the malady of solitude
by moonvalentine32
Summary: A few years after the war, they're still trying to regain their footing.
1. Chapter 1

a/n: This is a sort of prequel to a fic I've been writing for a few years now, and am finally ready to begin. I found this in my drafts from a little over a year ago, tweaked it to fit where the story currently is, and am ready once and for all to put it out in the world. This will come in three parts which I'll post over the course of the week. I hope you guys like it. I really, really miss kakasaku.

ps - the first part of each chapter are lyrics that i am not cool enough to write. highly recommend googling them and listening to the songs they come from. i am advertising this because i can't find decent links to them anywhere lol. anyway yes. listen.

pps - to any puppy love readers, I have not forgotten you. It's been a very long and busy while since I've updated but I am still working on that story. It's only about halfway done, and not having it done bothers me every SINGLE day of my life lmfao. I hope you're still here. Thanks for bearing with me while I dip my toes back into the water. I love y'all.

xo

* * *

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 _you paint yourself white_

 _and fill up with noise_

 _but there'll be something missing_

 _._

 _._

 _._

Solitude was a state Kakashi was used to all his life. While it had been somewhat difficult to come to terms with once the post-war celebrations died down, in time it became one more thing to stop dwelling on, to get used to.

His team did not seek him out. They had their reasons; they all simply went their separate ways, working toward their own goals. He didn't fault them for that, nor did he not ponder whether they faulted him for falling out of touch. He wasn't sure where the responsibility lied anyway.

If he were being honest with himself, they hadn't been a team for years. There may have been an ounce of hope, the _tiniest_ glimmer of something to hold onto, when the four of them had fought together on the battlefield. But they hadn't really been fighting as a whole, just individually toward a common end. Even then he'd known it was wishful thinking. By now he had learned, with a faint bitterness on his tongue, not to hope for anything.

He decided to try and count his blessings instead. He had a roof over his head. He had two properly functioning eyes now, both of them his own. He was healthy, even for his age, and could still work with ease.

He supposed being alive should count as a blessing. Not many ninja lived to his age—that in itself was an achievement, even if it was by pure chance that he hadn't died by now. Even if the days loomed ahead of him with static, heavy obligation, ticking down the seconds until he disappeared into thin air or was buried unceremoniously in the Konoha cemetery—even in this perpetual emptiness, slowly leeching at him with a hollow trickle he barely noticed anymore—even now, Kakashi was still alive. That had to count for something.

After a while, though, he stopped caring whether it did.

.

.

He wasn't in Konoha often these days, but when he was he didn't do much. With the exception of some scant grocery shopping or taking the dogs to the vet, Kakashi mostly spent his time reading on rooftops or catching up on sleep.

He was quite popular around the distribution office. A jounin sensei without an active team was in the highest demand for missions. It meant he had no obligations to a routine structure, and he had more than adequate experience as a leader of ninja no matter the rank. Given Kakashi's extensive history, too, he was particularly prone to assignments of the solo and highly classified variety.

Sometimes it felt like the time he was away stretched longer and longer, the end so distant and elusive that the thought of returning home itself was abstract, unreal. He was never truly excited to be home; it was simply a relief that he could finally hole up for a few days without distraction. All he looked forward to was being able to read his books in the dusty sunlit silence of his apartment and make sure his resilient little plant hadn't withered beyond salvation.

There were days when he got out of the house for a walk, if just to escape his own head for a while. He would go to the convenience store, open book in hand, for some nikuman, onigiri, cup ramen; he found any excuse to get some fresh air and not have to cook his own meals. He would inevitably pass by Ichiraku on his way, and each time he felt the slightest lurch in his stomach.

After the fourth war, he used to go there by himself for old time's sake to chat amiably with Teuchi over a bowl of miso ramen or, if he were in a particularly pleasant mood, tantanmen with just the right amount of hot chili oil. Once in a while he would run into Naruto, who was often there with friends—usually Sai or Iruka or Kiba—and they would catch up for a bit before Kakashi ducked out and left his former student with the check.

It was all in good fun, of course, and each meeting left his spirits higher. But then Naruto joined ANBU, and Teuchi got busy with the peacetime tourists, and going there felt more like a chore than anything.

Kakashi reasoned that he had enough of those already as he walked past the ramen stand one cloudy evening. He bought his food from the corner store, went home, and slept off the remainder of the mission he'd returned from that morning.

.

.

Tsunade had known Kakashi longer than he'd known her. Maybe it was lingering respect for his father, or rather guilt—or maybe it was for his history in ANBU and the war, the fact that he could be trusted to discreetly and thoroughly follow through with whatever she needed. Maybe it was because he could hold his liquor better than her—but then again, almost anyone could.

Whatever the reason, it gave her the idea that she could approach him on a personal level. She called him to her office one day when he'd dropped by the jounin lounge to look at mission postings.

"Kakashi," she greeted tersely as he stood before her desk, hands in his pockets and back in its perpetual slouch. "Are you taking proper care of yourself?"

He didn't miss a beat, despite being distracted by the small flock of birds that was gathering on the railing outside her windows. "Sure."

Tsunade sniffed sharply, crossing her arms over her abundant chest. "According to the records, you've just accepted your sixth mission assignment of the season. That makes this the sixth consecutive one you'll take without more than a few days' rest in between." A shapely brown eyebrow arched at him, concerned in her subtle way and challenging all at once. "Don't run yourself ragged. Despite popular belief, you're not dispensable."

"Thank you, Tsunade-sama." Both of his eyes smiled at her. He still found it strange not to have one covered.

For a tense stretch of a moment, she said nothing, just stared at him with an unmistakable flare of amber. When he didn't move but to let his face fall out of his smile, she chewed at the inside of her lip, eyes narrowed.

"Alright then." She removed a scroll from a desk drawer, tossing it to him as easily as he caught it. "Don't die out there. And I don't care if you come back with a goddamned paper cut—go to the hospital when you return. You're long overdue for your annual."

There was a reason for that, one she knew well. After years of sharingan-induced comas and watching comrades die on surgery tables, he dreaded the hospital more than anywhere else. A little tough love wouldn't change that.

"Of course," he said. As usual, she didn't look appeased, but sent him out regardless.

.

.

Unfortunately for him, there weren't many home remedies for an infected stab wound. He'd returned from his solo mission a day or two before—the specifics eluded him as they'd blurred together in long, deep stretches of sleep.

Eventually either Pakkun or Genma, who had likely bullied his way past the seals on his door or windows, had done the honorable thing and went to fetch a nurse. At least he assumed as much when he woke to the burning, sterile odor of rubbing alcohol.

There was a sensation of cool hands on his back, one keeping his shoulder in place so he was propped on his side while the other was a palm pressed gingerly into his clammy, fever-damp skin. There were hushed whispers behind him that he couldn't quite make out, and he distinctly felt the weight of one of his dogs curled against his ankle.

He'd been expecting to wake to the frigid green-gray light of the hospital, so he was vaguely relieved to find the wall beside his bed at home instead, the scratches and pock marks made visible by the low light of the lamp above him. It was evening; his room softly glowed orange from the streetlamp outside his window. It didn't quite illuminate the whole of the room, from what he could see—the corners of the space still clung to shadows that masked the water stains on the paneled ceiling, the small cracks in the wooden trim.

"Kakashi-sensei?" a unmistakably feminine voice asked, one he recognized.

"Sakura?" He didn't realized he'd said it until she squeezed his shoulder, the pressure a short acknowledgment. She must have seen he was awake by how stiff he'd suddenly become.

"Don't move," she urged gently at his attempt to roll over. "I have to finish getting the infection out of your bloodstream."

He conceded silently, trying to make sense of this half-woken moment. It was hard to believe that someone was…here. There was something strange about having another person here in his room, the place that was at once private to him, his home, yet was somehow just as inconsequential.

It wasn't that he was uncomfortable. Kakashi simply felt aware of everything—the hum of chakra burning in his blood, electric and not his own beneath his muscles; the quiet rattle of his old air conditioner; the presence of a girl he hadn't spoken to beyond a hand wave or polite pleasantries in at least two years. A girl he'd known in the most vivid period of his life—a time which often seemed more a dream in a fever not unlike this one.

For a brief while he wondered if this, too, was a dream. His mind felt hazy around the edges, his body sore and unpleasantly warm. A tingling numbness covered his side where Sakura was healing him, mending whatever he hadn't thought to fix.

He wasn't sure if he should say something to her. His breath was shallow and long in his throat, hair matted to his forehead, arms sore and skin damp with a thin, wan sweat. It wasn't the best time for small talk. Or any kind of talk, really. What was there to say besides an apology for something he couldn't name?

He wasn't sure how much time passed, but she too said nothing else until her hands left his back. There was a hesitance to the motion, as if she weren't sure she was finished, but she withdrew them once the thread of her chakra dissipated, fading slowly into nothing instead of the harsh snap he remembered from other medic-nin.

"You can lie down now, sensei."

"Okay." The word left his mouth much quieter than anticipated. The rawness in his throat had vanished entirely, as had the heat in his upper body. He rolled slowly onto his back, finding the sheet cool against his exposed skin. Sakura had cut his undershirt open from the bottom hem up to his neck. She'd left his mask intact.

She was sitting on the edge of the bed when he opened his eyes again. He wasn't expecting her to be so close, or to look so different. Older, perhaps, was the better word.

The first thing he noticed was that her hair was not short like it had been during the war, but instead was long enough to fall down her back, sort of like it was in her genin days. It looked nearly red in the dim light of his bedroom, bright and thick as he remembered Kushina's to be when he would come to fetch Minato in the mornings and find her brushing it in front of the mirror.

His initial reaction was to wonder if this was some sort of projection of Sakura—younger, wanting to help him as much as she used to—but she was taller, even sitting down, and he could see the curve of her shoulder, a little broader and straighter than it used to be, and the way her shirt clung to a slim waist.

 _Stop._ His eyes immediately fell closed, and his jaw tightened. Something in him lurched at the sight of her sitting on the very edge of the mattress, her hands in her lap—he couldn't remember the last time he'd spoken to her, let alone seen her. Part of him wanted to ask what she was doing there, but after all this time of nothing, he wasn't quite sure how to speak to her now.

"Do you feel any better?" He dared to open sleep-heavy eyes again to find her face neutral, her eyes on his own face. "You look better."

"I think so," he replied, because he wasn't sure how else to respond. None of this felt real except for his injury. There was a lingering tension in his back and sweat at his hairline, but he no longer felt the split of skin in his middle, nor the sear of infection that he'd only become aware of in its absence.

"Good." A smile touched her mouth, not quite matching the rest of her expression. "You should take a shower. I'll change your sheets." She moved to stand.

"Sakura."

"Yes?" She turned, hand poised to tuck hair behind her ear. The movement was so delicate and small that it caught him off guard—he never thought her to be a particularly delicate type, but everything she'd been doing since he came to was done so carefully, and it just…it felt wrong, in some odd, distant way.

It was likely in response to her surroundings. He could sense the way he appeared: dirty, only halfway awake, arms laid against his sides on irrevocably rumpled sheets. The layer of dust in his room from his constant absences. The sparse furnishings he'd never thought to change. She looked so entirely out of place here.

"Why are you here?" he asked instead of whatever it was he'd intended to say.

Her arm fell slowly to her side. Now she was really looking at him, a presence to her eyes that hadn't been there before.

"Does it matter?"

 _Shit._ He'd offended her. She didn't sound angry, but he could tell she was by the way her posture grew stiff. "I didn't—"

Sakura started at the same time. "That's not—"

The pause was awkward, thick. But it loosened her up immediately—she let out a sharp sigh, swiping hair away from her neck and over her shoulder, and turned her gaze to the window.

"I just meant…I'm glad you're better." Her tone grew softer as she spoke. She looked at him again, searchingly, but he wasn't sure what else to do besides look back. "Just—go take a shower, sensei. You have blood on your sheets."

Something told her that she wasn't in the mood for him to say otherwise, to tell her he could handle it on his own. Kakashi followed her order, albeit at a rather sore, lethargic pace; he let Bisuke jump to the floor as he stepped to his chest of drawers to find a change of clothes. His current ones, the same undershirt and sweatpants he'd been wearing on his return trip, stuck to him in wrinkled patches.

Once more, fleetingly, he thought about how she must see him—filthy clothes, unkempt room, untended wounds—and felt the need to apologize for something.

"I hope whoever begged you to fix me up didn't bother you too much." He gave her a vacant smile with his eyes, hoping it came across as some kind of grateful. "You must be busy."

"No." She paused, eyes quickly returning to the window. "Nobody sent me here, actually."

He was puzzled by her admission, as well as her demeanor—it was shy, clammed up in that same way that didn't sit well. More of that hesitance. It didn't suit her at all.

"I'm not on duty right now. I was just in the area and thought I'd stop by." She scratched at her arm in long, slow strokes. "One of the dogs let me in when I got here."

Bisuke pawed guiltily behind his ear with a hind foot. Kakashi resisted the urge to raise a brow at his ninken—he didn't realize his seals had been weak enough for either of the two to dispel. He'd have to rectify that.

"I'm sorry, Sakura," he said, voice still rough from sleep and sick, the old honorific catching in his throat before he could say it. "I'm sure you didn't come here expecting to patch me up."

"Don't apologize." Her hand absently traveled up and down the sleeve of her shirt, some civilian garment he'd never seen her in before. She really wasn't here on work orders, it seemed. "It's a good thing I came by, or else that could've…it would have been really bad."

He tried to think of something else to say—something reassuring, perhaps—but he'd never been particularly gifted at that. Especially when it came to her. Kakashi simply nodded his agreement, reaching for a towel in the cabinet.

"Anyway," she said with a huff of a laugh, " _go._ Get in the shower. I don't need you getting another infection."

He held his hands up in mock surrender, trying to keep his tone light for her sake. "Fine, fine."

By the time he returned to his room, clean and rid of his lingering symptoms, she was gone.

He hadn't really expected her to stay. If he were a better mentor or team leader or whatever he was to them, he would have asked her to stay, or to catch up, or at would least properly thank her before sending her back off into the night. He could chalk this one up to illness. But what would happen the next time he saw her or had the opportunity to speak with her? Would there _be_ a next time? Given the tense, short way he'd certainly come across to her tonight, he wasn't sure she would seek him out again.

He slumped onto his neatly made bed, the fresh sheets crisply stretched over the mattress, but something stopped him from settling in.

On his comforter beside him was a note. He held it near the lamp to read the narrow scrawl of words.

 _Please take care of yourself,_ it said, the first word underlined as if it were a prescription. He stared at it for a long minute, then set it down by his books and sank into bed with heavy limbs. He pulled down his mask, rubbing a calloused palm against his stubbled cheek, brushing the hair off his forehead with a deep exhale. When his hand hit the bed again, he was met with another surprise.

A small box was perched by his pillow; he picked it up in a careful instant. It was wrapped in iridescent green paper and adorned with a yellow ribbon. Deliberately, he peeled away the gift wrap with his thumb, only to find inside a new pair of fingerless combat gloves identical to the ones he always wore.

Confused and only partly serious, Kakashi's first instinct was to look to his calendar, but hadn't changed it in months, and he'd been asleep on and off for days and wasn't sure exactly when he'd returned.

"Bisuke," he mumbled into the dark, too-quiet space, "what day is it?"

"Pretty sure it's the fifteenth," the dog replied in his usual rasp, hopping back on the bed to curl at the end. His owner hardly noticed, though; all he felt was the unnamable constricting in his stomach.

It was the fifteenth of September. Kakashi's birthday.

.

.

He wasn't sure how to deal with the situation once it had passed. All he knew was that he thought about it more than he meant to.

Often he found himself turned toward the mirror with an odd posture, searching for a glimpse of a scar running along the skin of his side. But Sakura was thorough—this much he knew. She never liked to leave scars. Scars were a sign of an unfinished job, one she hadn't completed to the full extent of her abilities, and she never left them if she could help it.

No one seemed to know about his unfortunate circumstances that night, either. Genma hadn't ribbed him about a dramatic brush with death, for one, and Tsunade never summoned him to cast more doubt about his health, physical or otherwise.

At this, Kakashi recalled how Sakura had seemed awkward in the small space of his room, and he eventually came to the conclusion that she had been embarrassed to be there in the first place and decided to stay discreet about it. A multitude of reasons existed that could hold true—ones he could only begin to think of—so he left it at that.

For a few weeks he thought about saying something to her. There were opportunities—at the very minimum, Kakashi could have easily stopped by the hospital to thank her for healing him, or to get the annual he'd half-promised. He vaguely remembered where her apartment was and could have visited her there as well, but he was sure her hours were too irregular for her to be home often. Leaving a note felt too formal for whatever kind of acquaintance they shared.

In the end, he worried that none of it had happened, and so he refrained from saying anything at all.

The gloves were the only indicator that it hadn't simply been a figment of his imagination, some desperate wish for help in a moment of illness or a dream that was just realistic enough, something with just enough straws to grasp at to fuck with him in his waking hours. He didn't dwell on what it would mean if his mind had projected such an image of him—sick, rotting, dying alone until practically resurrected by a student he'd failed, a girl kind enough at heart to still bring him a birthday present and waste her time healing someone who did not deserve so much, least of all from her.

Before he even saw her again, before he could even think of anything to say, he was sent on another mission.

.

.

This particular assignment had taken months longer than it was supposed to, no thanks to unforeseen developments in their intelligence as well as how delicate the situation was. Their infiltration into a land in the midst of an uprising, one under military rule, had to be done extremely carefully so as not to draw any suspicion or bring Konoha under fire.

As the team leader, Kakashi could not—and would not—allow his team to die for something that was directly under his command, something that was ultimately up to him. Because of his extreme caution, he'd had to spend months with three strangers, holed up in a safehouse in the middle of nowhere. Nothing to do but train and think.

As skilled but relatively young ANBU operatives, his other teammates were serious and quiet ninja who hardly spoke to one other. He was used to the veteran agents, ones who were willing to cut loose a little when there was nothing else to do. It'd been a long time since he had seen Yamato or Sai or any of his old Team Ro members, and it would have been nice to see a familiar face, to hold some conversation that wasn't related to a highly possible death.

It occurred to him more than once that Naruto was now a member of ANBU, and he wondered how someone so full of life, so unabashedly exuberant and accepting of the world, fared in the ranks of such a dark and unfeeling organization. He found that he had no desire to find out—instead he was simply grateful that his former student hadn't been placed on his team.

He spent Christmas and New Year's in hiding, reading the same novel he'd been rereading for months as he'd only been allowed to bring one. Their cabin was mostly uninsulated, undecorated, the mattresses on their bunks hard and unyielding and their blankets barely thick enough to stave off the mountainside chill. He found himself missing his dogs, who he could rarely summon in such a precarious environment, as well as his own bed, lit warm by the sun that streamed through the windows every afternoon.

He spent spring in a foreign country, disguised as a stranger, working toward an assassination that meant the death of several officials.

And in the end, his team was caught in the crossfire.

.

.

On paper, the mission had been a success, despite the fact that three Konoha shinobi were dead, their corpses left on foreign soil.

Kakashi had no time to mourn them in his escape. He'd barely made it out alive himself.

.

.

When he woke up to the harsh, sterile stench of chemicals, he had no idea where he was—it was too dark to see, and he could barely move. A steady rhythm of beeps sounded somewhere close to him.

A hospital.

His sore muscles loosened, sagging his entire body against the bed. _Konoha._ Where he'd crashed, he wasn't sure, but someone had found him and brought him back. Relief welled inside his chest, rippling into his lungs, allowing him to let go of the breath which had seized in his throat.

It was difficult to assess the damage when he couldn't get a visual. He could feel his leg bound in some kind of cast—his knee had been damaged in the fight, as he was starting to recall—and there were bandages on his hand and around his chest. His mask had been swapped for a sheet placed right above his nose, and for a moment he was reminded of the way dead men were carried off to the morgue: a sheet over their bodies, even if blood mercilessly stained the white, as a sign of respect.

He was alive, and the others had died.

His teeth clamped together inside his mouth; his jaw clenched so tightly it trembled.

"Hatake-san?" a mild voice asked as it approached, and after a startling movement against his eyes, he could see. Light pierced his vision. He must've had a head wound.

"How long have I been out?" Kakashi's voice crackled at the edges.

"Three and a half days," the nurse replied. Her attire did not go unnoticed—dark gray scrubs instead of white; a Fire Country insignia instead of the Hidden Leaf's. "Border patrol brought you here for emergency care once you crossed over. How are you feeling?"

The question echoed in his mind, niggling at the back of his head until another once surfaced. _Do you feel any better?_ And suddenly, more than anything, he wanted to be back in his apartment. The desire gripped his chest as if a hand had reached inside it. He didn't deserve to, but he wanted to go home and sleep this off in solitude, to sweat this out of his system, even if it killed him like it would have the last time.

 _It's a good thing I came by, or else that could've…_

"I'm fine." He closed his heavy eyes. "I'll be fine."

.

.

Nearly three weeks passed before Kakashi, fully healed, entered the gates of Konoha.

As expected, Tsunade gave him some "time off"—which was, as all experienced ninja knew well, a guise for a mandatory mourning period. A great deal of the time, trauma and grief didn't choose to set in until days, weeks, even months after whatever incident had caused them. What she didn't seem to understand was that he'd had more than enough time to think about the mission before he'd returned to the village.

For Kakashi, guilt was the only type of mourning he experienced anymore. It was selfish, he knew. He was sure those ninja had gone into the mission knowing the risks, _knowing_ they would die. A few times he had to remind himself that this was a requirement of any ANBU agent. Their jobs, while largely being the least recognized, were the most dangerous of all.

Their deaths, sudden and brutal, hit too close to home for him. The reminder of his failure was more than unfriendly. The lives of three talented, sharp, _young_ shinobi were gone while he was still alive. He was the team leader, the one who was meant to protect them even if it meant sacrificing himself. He thought about his own cruel fate with a vacant sort of irony—even now, he was the one left behind, the one alive to shoulder the darkness in the wake of their deaths. Would he ever be able to make amends for the people who had died beside him?

For him?

 _By_ him?

Kakashi had forgiven his father, was proud of him for sacrificing his reputation and livelihood to keep all those other men alive. But the more he experienced death and lived to tell, the more he understood why his father had taken his own life.

There was a hollow comfort in the thought of living a new life after this, one where he wasn't the cause for so much hatred and death. Every now and then the image of his one full, living team—Naruto, Sasuke, Sakura—flashed behind his eyes for a brief, dull moment, one that would grow sharper, acutely more painful if he thought about how much of a lost cause they were for him.

Part of him ached for the days when he could at least pretend things were simpler, when the three of them were young and uncomplicated and just wanted to learn how to defend each other. But that time had lasted only so briefly. His three students had always, _would_ always be complicated; he just hadn't seen as much until it was too late to do much for them.

It was on his worst days that he thought about Sasuke in particular. The one he'd never truly known beyond sharing in understanding the emptiness of death, the hateful burn of revenge, the grief that had plagued them both into a withdrawn sort of life. Kakashi wasn't sure how different Sasuke would have been if he hadn't taught him surefire killing techniques, or how to use a sharingan, or if he hadn't honed in on that blind, furious hunger for power.

His instincts told him, as they always had, that there was little he could have done for the last Uchiha. Their clan was born into fire and strength, all somber and silent. Sasuke had inherited what the dead had bled out and left behind, and Kakashi had seen him nearly burst at the seams with it. But now he was back and had been dealt with by those he'd wronged—now he was the constant they had always craved. He'd become calm, gray, impassive. Somber and silent as if none of it had ever happened.

Sometimes Kakashi wished it hadn't. But then someone would knock on his door or send him a message, forcing him out of solitude, and he would get up and keep existing exactly the way he always had—the only way he knew how to.

Once he spent a few nights at the bar down the street, either aided by empty conversation with Genma or Kurenai or simply spent alone, he found it easier to move past what was plaguing him. He'd learned by now how to cope with things, how to forget just enough to survive and how to tamp it down whenever it resurfaced. How not to think about the things he couldn't change.

After three decades in the business, he was an expert at staying numb.

.

.

Per the request—or, rather, the urging—of his ninken, he found himself in the supermarket not long after his return to buy dog food, as well as some human food that wasn't just rice or whichever items still lingered stale and inedible in his cobwebbed pantry.

His usual route took him right past Ichiraku, as it always did. He wanted to ignore it, especially the potential for impromptu socialization that he truly did not feel like engaging in, but he hadn't eaten a real meal in weeks— _months—_ and the tantalizing steam billowing from behind the restaurant's wrinkled noren was like a siren's call.

The moment Kakashi walked in, shoulders hunched to pass through the curtains, he slipped into a seat at the end of the bar and waved a casual hand at Teuchi, who greeted him with enthusiasm.

"I'll be just a minute," the man called as he walked into the back room of the restaurant. Kakashi smiled with very little energy, just enough to be polite, and let his chin rest in his palm. A brightness in his periphery drew his attention to the opposite end of the counter.

Sakura stood there, tapping her foot slowly, subconsciously as she looked at him. She smiled at him in her pleasant way, hands in the pockets of her crisp, starch-white medical coat, one only surgeons or high-ranking medic-nin wore at the hospital. Kakashi was suddenly very aware of himself—his back went stiff; his fingers tightened against the fabric covering his jaw.

"Hey," she said softly, shifting where she stood. Reluctant.

"Sakura-chan," he said with practiced nonchalance, none of which he'd had the last time he saw her, and creased his eyes into a smile. "It's been a while."

A few beats passed before she made the decision to come and sit next to him, her steps measured. Her knees locked together once she hopped onto the stool. Her hair was in pigtails not entirely unlike Tsunade's, except these were thick, haphazardly woven pink braids, and it was the same length it had been when she came to his house last year, if not longer.

"When did you get back?" She stared up at him with spring-green eyes, brows creasing beneath her seal.

"Oh, uh…about a week ago."

"Good," she breathed, gaze fixed on the wooden counter. He heard her breathe an unstable sigh. "That's—that's good."

Kakashi nodded awkwardly. There seemed to be more she wanted to say, so he waited.

"I was so worried about you," she finally whispered, swiveling toward him ever so slightly. "I heard you were at a medical outpost, and I wanted to come and heal you myself, but—" She sighed again, this time with eyes closed and an edge of something close to frustration. "Since it was an ANBU-delegated mission, no one would tell me where you were. I don't have the clearance to find that kind of stuff out either."

A hollow thump resounded inside his ribcage. It shouldn't have surprised him that she was willing to go to such lengths, but it did. Sakura had always been the kind of person to take care of things herself.

 _I don't need you getting another infection._

"It's okay," he told her, putting as much of the sentiment into his voice as he could muster, which admittedly was not much. "I survived." _Unfortunately,_ he thought fleetingly _._ "It just took a bit longer to heal than usual."

He recalled the silver-pink scars that now ran in lines across the back of his shoulders, his thumb, the sides of his knees and one down his shin. While he didn't particularly care about them—they were just some of many now—she would care. He didn't mention them.

Her hand tugged at a pigtail, looping the loose end around her finger over and over and over.

"You know, I miss our team," she said with a despondent smile. "It was so much easier to keep track of you three back then."

Kakashi should have said something, and he could have. But then Teuchi returned, reaching over the counter to place a huge bag full of takeout containers between the two of them, and the moment was sufficiently interrupted by the crinkle of thin plastic and a polite exchange.

"Here you go, sweetheart. Shizune-chan said it's on the tab this time; she'll have someone from the office come and settle it later." The man grinned, lines deepening jovially around his eyes.

"Thank you so much, Teuchi-san. We've got a long afternoon ahead of us, so I really appreciate you putting this all together on such short notice." She returned his expression, her cheeks lifting into a sweet, youthful expression. Kakashi felt an almost painful twinge of nostalgia.

"No problem at all. Kakashi-san, the usual?"

"Sure," he responded, not quite sure what he was agreeing to and not really caring. Sakura was gathering the bag in her arms, about to make her departure, and the moment closed in on him.

"Well, I have to go," she said, her smile turning rueful. "But I'm glad I ran into you, sensei. I can rest a lot easier now that I've seen you with my own eyes."

The words twisted his stomach with guilt. "Sakura," he said, though he wasn't sure where he was going with it. "Wait."

She paused for a half-second, one that would have gone unnoticed if he didn't know her, and turned around.

"Oh—I almost forgot to tell you." Her smile was still there, though a corner of her mouth twitched, faltering just a bit. "Tsunade-shishou wants to you to drop by her office for something. She told me to pass that along if I happened to see you."

Before he could give her any kind of response, she left the shop in a blur of pink and white, and he was left as alone as he'd hoped to be when he arrived.

Kakashi barely finished half his meal once it was placed before him. Ramen, he realized, tasted much better with company.

.

.

Tsunade was unusually quiet when he made it to her office several hours later, long after courtesy would have granted him a more enthusiastic—or in the Hokage's case, aggressive—greeting. But he swiftly realized that this had little to do with his habitual tardiness.

"Kakashi," she said from where her hands were folded before her mouth, elbows placed rigidly on her desk. "Take a seat."

It was a command that he felt was in his best interest to follow, so he carefully slumped into the chair beside her desk. The windows outside showed the evening approaching the darkness of night on the horizon; the room itself was still and tense, lit only by a few lamps. It was then that he noticed the lack of Shizune in the room. Dread crept beneath his ribs in an instant.

"This isn't about you being Hokage," Tsunade muttered, reading his mind. "Right now I couldn't care less about that."

His shoulders slackened, though with hesitance. "Oh?"

Her gaze cut toward him, fierce and unyielding, but he could sense foreboding lurking there.

"The uprisings in the north have become a cause for concern among the council members." She said the words as if they tasted bad, crude and sour. "You did your part there, and you did it well. But the assassinations caused a backlash that has sent other prominent villages there into a state of militarization, which could not only affect our trade and delegation agreements, not to mention our peace agreements, but could cost the lives of hundreds. Thousands, more accurately, especially now that our allies are putting the blame on us."

The image of his only female ANBU teammate, spine broken and neck fatally slashed, flew to the forefront of Kakashi's head. His other teammates had faced similar fates—one had been practically flayed alive; the other was stabbed once in the skull and twice in the chest, hard enough to break ribs and puncture a lung.

The wooden arm of his chair was hardly enough for his fingers to grip as his knuckles went white. He said nothing.

"They want us to bulk up our defenses." Weary, she rubbed fingers into her forehead, the middle one pressing into her seal. He wondered how it felt, if it hurt when she did that. "I personally believe we already have enough here—you, me, Sakura, and Naruto, who is stronger than ever. He's also improved drastically from his battle with Pein, which was the last great threat to this village. But—"

Kakashi stiffened as she huffed a sigh. He already knew exactly where she was going with this.

"Sasuke," he said, half to her and half to himself. Tsunade nodded slowly, eyes closed.

"The council thinks he's our trump card," she told him, opening them after a dense pause. "And I'm inclined to agree, all things considered."

"He still has several years left in his sentence, Tsunade-sama. This isn't the best precedent to set for other situations like his."

"Now you're thinking like a Hokage," she murmured, a grim smile stretching across her lips. "But there _aren't_ any other situations like his. We forgave him for things other people did, pardoned his punk ass, and then we left him to his own devices. How many other rogue nin can we say that for?"

The question was a rhetorical one. They'd never quite known what to do with Sasuke, who was at once a victim of a tragic story, a citizen of Konoha, and a thorn in their sides. An unknown. It was why they'd sealed his chakra off in the first place—both as a punishment of sorts and a reassurance. It was why he'd been unofficially kept in the village, living as a civilian.

Tsunade grit her teeth in the silence and reached to open a desk drawer. What she pulled out—a bottle of cheap sake, likely the only kind she could sneak in here without causing a commotion, and a cup—did not surprise him.

"Drink?"

"Yes," he replied as she pulled out another cup, letting them clink around on the desk when she filled them, some spilling onto the chipped wooden surface in her haste. She downed hers in one go and promptly refilled while Kakashi let his mask slip down to drink his own. Tsunade had seen his face on more than one occasion, usually when bringing him back from the dead, and he had long since stopped caring that she knew what he looked like.

"Alright," she declared, her resolve back in motion. "We need to test the waters before we take any more action."

"You mean send him back into the field."

"I do."

His first instinct was to tell her no, that this was likely not a good idea, but there was enough evidence to prove otherwise. Sasuke had exhibited exemplary mental stability and responsibility since his return and subsequent trial, so much so that at this point there was no reason _not_ to trust him.

And yet, Kakashi was hesitating.

"I want to put him in a familiar setting first—back with his original team," Tsunade told him, each word measured. "Should something happen, and I have reason to believe that it won't, I think you three are the ones best equipped to handle him."

 _Better safe than sorry,_ he thought to himself. Ever since the village was destroyed and rebuilt, this had been the way.

"Have you told them about this?" He recalled Sakura's tense disposition when he'd seen her earlier. Had she known then?

"I don't have to." One of Tsunade's golden-brown brows arched, daring him to challenge her. "This is what they've wanted since day one."

Tsunade didn't have to give anyone a choice—she'd made her decision and it was his duty to obey it. The sake swirled against his tongue, heavy in a way that made it difficult to swallow, stinging too sweet and warm between his teeth.

"He has to return to our forces at some point, Kakashi," she continued when he didn't respond. "I'd rather let him off early on good behavior than chance another devastation that we could easily have prevented."

He nodded, because he saw her point. Truly, he did. The ninja working in the northern forces, the ones sparking all the chaos there among innocent civilians, were ruthless killing machines. Ones he had seen firsthand and didn't particularly wish to again, especially not in his homeland. But he knew by now that devastation could come from anywhere, always when they least expected it.

"What do you need me to do?" His voice was low to his own ears, gruff in a way he didn't like.

"We're only restoring access to half of his regular chakra stores for the time being. I want you to monitor him and report. Make sure he's ready for the other half."

Kakashi nodded. Accepting it. Trying not to question it. "Alright."

Tsunade tipped back the rest of her drink and slammed the cup back onto her desk, sighing weightily.

"You need to trust me." She stared at him hard _,_ the way that no one could ever defy. "I'm not just doing this for me. Or for them."

He finished off his own drink and pulled up his mask. "I understand. Cross my heart."

"I don't think you do understand, Kakashi. But you will." Her stare finally left him when she turned to face the windows. The sky was finally dark. "Dismissed."

She didn't have to tell him twice. He stood up after a moment of lingering in thought, then left through the doorway without another word.


	2. Chapter 2

**a/n:** happy thursday uwu

* * *

.

.

.

 _don't kid yourself_

 _and don't fool yourself_

 _this love's too good to last_

 _and i'm too old to dream_

 _._

 _._

 _._

Between missions, his father used to take him on outings, little excursions where the company consisted of the two of them. Kakashi, despite his young age, deigned himself too mentally excellent to find these trips fun or exciting; he would spend the time it took to arrive at their destination complaining about missing training, about how his dad was _supposed_ to act like a the ninja he was, and real ninja never took breaks for frivolous nonsense. Sakumo would always respond with a simple laugh, deep and full, a sound that his son often found himself missing after his father had grown despondent—even more so when he was gone.

They two of them would always walk through the front gates of the village and into the woods, carrying a cooler full of lemonade and homemade sandwiches and a pack with whatever else they would need. Some days it was fishing rods and bait rented from one of the civilian district's recreational shops; others it was a motley of old camping supplies that had seen better days but were still perfectly usable.

Kakashi wanted to go swiftly as he made his way through the cover of trees, over creeks and rocks with edges smooth and eroded by rain, cool to the touch. But Sakumo would calmly insist he slow down and enjoy, to listen to the birds warbling and singing to each other from high branches. Soak in the light of the sun as it trickled through the trees, all its golden warmth tender on his skin in a way he never got to enjoy when rushing through. Feel the way his feet pressed into the earth, the delicate skeletons of fallen foliage and pine needles cushioning the fall of fresh, waxy green leaves. Just _be._

As a stubborn child, he made a show of putting up a fight, of hating the trite idea of walking when they could run—he and his father were two of the fastest shinobi in the country, save for the Yellow Flash. And then he would take a moment to notice what Sakumo patiently waited for him to see and feel, and he would settle into quiet. Peace.

They spent these afternoons by the valley river, catching trout that shimmered bronze and wet when their scales caught the sunlight. Sakumo would tell him anecdotes from missions or memories about his mother, most of which occurred before she grew sick. When he smiled, his eyes would crinkle at the corners, soft and cinnamon warm; the creases in his forehead would vanish like they had never been there. Kakashi drank in every moment of it.

If time allowed, the two of them would make camp for the night near the riverbank. They stargazed by the firelight, watching its sparks float heavenward to join the twinkling points in the sky. It was easy to get sleepy after eating a supper of broiled fish and soft bread from home. There was a happiness that came from a full stomach and the low, soothing timbre of his father's voice as he pointed out constellations, ones which would guide them home if they were ever lost. A fullness came from the cool streaming of the river over rocks and the crackle of the kindling wood as it succumbed to the heat. Out there, it felt like the world was infinite, and they were the only two living in it—and for a child, even one like him, that was something spectacular.

By the end of the night, he would find himself asleep in the space between Sakumo's arm and chest, curled against his side and buried in his long silver-white hair. He would stay half-awake as his father carried him gently inside the tent, tucked him beneath the worn quilt from their sofa, smoothed his hair back from his face over and over to lull him back to sleep. Even now, Kakashi could recall the way their clothes smelled rich with smoke, the familiar tune his father used to hum beneath his breath while the insects chirped outside. He could remember how no matter what childish acts of arrogance he used to put up, Sakumo would take it in stride and treat him with kindness all the same.

More than anything, Kakashi could remember feeling safe, _loved,_ wholly and unconditionally.

Happy.

And he'd never really been since.

.

.

Kakashi woke with a bit of a start—something had jarred him into doing so, and after a moment of tension in his limbs, the culprit came from a loud knock on the door. He ran a hand through his hair, separating it from his forehead where it had stuck with sweat. The bedroom wasn't cool enough to ward off the summer air creeping in through the windowpanes above his head, unfortunately, and he'd been asleep deeply enough to dream. He got up to pull on a masked undershirt and answer whoever was waiting outside.

The peephole only revealed a warped image of a white mask, one he found to be designed in the general shape of a frog upon opening the door. A shock of buttercup yellow hair on its wearer told him all he needed to know, even if he hadn't sensed his wild chakra.

"Sen—" The ANBU agent cleared his throat. "Hatake Kakashi, you have been summoned by the Hokage for your immediate presence."

Kakashi glanced at the clock by his stove and dread immediately stiffened his fingers, flexed in his palms. Clearly he'd slept through his alarm, too far in sleep to notice. He was almost twenty minutes late—and today was not a day which could afford any of his usual habits. Within seconds he turned back toward his bedroom, grabbing discarded clothes along the way and slipping them on.

"How pissed is she?" he asked frankly, pulling sweatpants up toward his hips.

Naruto shrugged, all formality out the window now that the message was delivered. "More than usual, I guess. It's hard to tell when baa-chan gets all serious."

Kakashi's eyes closed as he exhaled deeply, flak vest heavy in his hands as he took it from its place on the back of the couch.

"Go ahead of me. Tell her I'm coming as quickly as possible."

"No can do." He scratched the back of his head, sending the blond locks into a bit of disarray. "She told me I couldn't come back unless you were with me."

 _Fuck,_ Kakashi thought, trying not to grind his teeth. _Of course not._ There was no time to put it on his hitae-ate the way he preferred, so he let it sit over the collar of his sweater.

The second his sandals were on and his vest was packed full of the necessary tools, he formed the necessary hand signals and prayed that Naruto followed suit. With a flare of chakra, he disappeared.

.

.

The day had come for Sasuke's sentence to be brought to an end.

After Kakashi's meeting with Tsunade, it hadn't taken the council long to move forward with their plans. It seemed as though they'd been waiting for a response out of mere courtesy, which made him question how much say he'd had in the decision to begin with. Something told him it wasn't much.

The procedure for semi-permanent chakra suppression wasn't impossible, but it required a hell of a lot of finesse and strength to carry out, even more so to reverse it. Of all the people in the village, the only ones capable of performing it were Tsunade and himself: both of them were highly proficient in fuinjutsu, had deep stores of chakra available, and had the most precision when it came to controlling and utilizing them.

Naruto was a good candidate for learning how to make the seal for future cases, but even with his clan's history with fuinjutsu and the taming he'd earned with the kyuubi, his chakra was still far too unstable to be reliable in such a delicate situation. Not to mention that his way of picking up and utilizing new skills was a bit unorthodox. Sakura was probably the only other person who was capable of learning how to properly do so and execute it without a hitch. She'd always had an excellent control on her chakra—and after all, she was Tsunade's apprentice.

It was why Kakashi wasn't surprised to see Sakura standing in the back of the room once he arrived. Rather than the hospital, they'd been asked to come to a wing of ANBU's medical facility, one not far from the autopsy rooms and classified medical archives. Tsunade had to give indisputable permission for whoever accompanied her today, himself excepting—the clearance level in the building was extremely high.

 _No one would tell me where you were. I don't have the clearance to find that kind of stuff out._

Kakashi looked to where Sakura leaned against the wall, her shoulders sloped forward to let her arms curve around each other and meet at her palms, fingers intertwined. She didn't seem quite as excited as he would think her to be at a time like this. Despite the prospect of witnessing a classified technique, as well as the prospect of freeing her old teammate—someone she'd spent years pining after and fighting for—from the only punishment he was still bound to, she looked unmistakably dejected.

He supposed he couldn't blame her. He hadn't quite been looking forward to this day either.

"For god's sake, Kakashi," Tsunade growled as she approached the doorway he'd been ushered through just seconds before. Sakura's gaze instantly snapped up to his in surprise. He looked away from their tired green and into the Hokage's dark, furious gold. "What excuse do you have for being late today?" She hooked a finger through his headband, still resting at the base of his neck, and scowled at his wrinkled clothes. "Certainly it wasn't because you were getting dressed."

"I had to feed the dogs," he replied with a good-natured crease of his eyes. It was always safer to evade a less exciting truth when she was angry. "Apologies, Tsunade-sama."

"Save it. We need to get to work." She slapped a calligraphy brush into his hand. "You remember the formula's inscriptions, correct?"

"Yes." Despite no longer having a sharingan, it wasn't something he could ever forget. Not after performing the opposite process.

She nodded resolutely and turned away. "Everyone out except for Kakashi, Shizune, and Sakura. I'll call you back in once we're finished."

The medic-nin filed out promptly, their white uniforms bright against the concrete floor and walls. Once they left, the space seemed huge, swallowed in darkness. Fluorescent lights could only do so much in a room without windows.

"Sakura," Tsunade said, commanding her attention in a voice less harsh than usual. "Follow me."

"Yes, shishou." Sakura instantly regained composure, back going straight and face serious, alert with attention. The two of them walked together to the far side of the border. Someone had already come to frame the sealing area in thick black lines, forming a large rectangle that stretched across most of the room. Kakashi took the middle while Shizune made her way to the closer side.

The middle was the most crucial part—it locked in all of the external chakra that would be used to unwrap Sasuke's seal. There weren't many in total, but each symbol was vital to the process. One wrong stroke and the whole thing would go south in an instant.

He took some ink from inside his flak vest and began writing, watching as the black soaked into the stone floor. For a brief moment, he pondered Tsunade's reason for making everyone leave: it was more than likely that no one else would be able to understand the significance without explanation. Even if they could, most of it would be covered—and after the process was complete, this would disappear, as if it had never happened in the first place. But then he heard her speaking.

"This line is used in the beginning of any chakra-sealing technique."

Kakashi glanced up to see Sakura looking intently over Tsunade's shoulder as she painted characters around the border. He'd been right after all—she was here to learn.

"Oh," Sakura said, pointing to something. "That's the same order used for a summons, isn't it?"

"Exactly." Tsunade's arm glided across the floor before her, writing with practiced skill. "They're elemental, so you see them in most fuinjutsu. But only in formulas that involve humans—or animals, in the case of summons. Shizune's drawing the same ones."

Sakura nodded, absorbing the words with a concentrating crease in her brow, a somewhat familiar expression of hers. Once she began asking about the order of elements, how they corresponded to ruling planets and medical techniques, Kakashi turned back to his work. Her questions echoed against the dark corners of the room, as did Tsunade's stern but detailed answers.

His own kanji were bold, rough strokes, words that were harsher and less forgiving than the elements. He wrote them slowly, methodically, precisely. As he worked, he could feel something trickling down his spine and into his stomach, dreadful and unpleasant—each character felt like he'd written it in blood. The image of him using a seal on Sasuke the first time, that horror during the chuunin exams, came to mind all too easily.

"Can you explain these to me, sensei?" Sakura asked, suddenly standing beside where he was crouching. Or perhaps she'd already been there without him noticing. His thumb twitched against the brush.

"Ah…yep. Uh, they're written and activated in clockwise order," he replied, finishing the last kanji in the innermost circle. The floor was cold beneath the palm he used to brace his weight. "You start with the binding character _—_ it takes the chakra of the people performing the unsealing and attaches it to the subject."

"And you're performing it?" When she moved to crouch beside him, she was close enough that he could easily see how her eyes were just a bit wider than usual, her fingers trembling enough to be noticeable. Too alert. She already knew the answer.

"With Tsunade-sama, yes." He couldn't remember if Sakura been there for the initial sealing—all he could remember were the pained screams, the way his arms felt so intensely weak, the sweat trickling down his brow, the overwhelming thought that he was failing Sasuke again by giving a life's worth of problems a temporary fix. He cleared his throat, now suddenly thick. "We're some of few that have enough chakra stores."

Sakura nodded slowly, prompting a piece of hair to fall from her bun and into her face, partly obscuring an eye. She didn't move to fix it—her hands were too busy wringing together and gently cracking her knuckles. "How much will it use?"

"Normally, it takes just about all of it." The hand holding his brush felt too warm, almost to the point of itching, and he realized that he'd forgotten to put on gloves earlier. Ink stained his fingers in little black flecks and bruises of charcoal, seeped under his nails like dirt. _Or blood._ He clenched his fist around the handle. "But since we're only restoring half, it won't take very much so long as we're precise."

That last part didn't escape her notice—she started chewing at the inside of her lip, which he saw was chapped. There was a moment where she didn't speak and didn't seem like she would, so he decided to continue.

"The next character is steel, which activates the concealment one beside it," he said, inclining the tip of his brush toward the respective kanji. "That's where the unraveling starts. With these and the nature character afterward it'll reverse—"

"Sensei," Sakura quietly interrupted.

"Hm?" Kakashi blinked, glancing over to find her looking at him intently, brows set straight on her forehead and that pink lock of hair still hanging in her line of sight.

She cast a glance over her shoulder, presumably where Shizune and Tsunade were chatting over a scroll by the closed doorway, and then looked back to him. "Do you think this is a good idea?"

He didn't need to ask what she meant by that. It was the same question he'd asked Tsunade, the same one he'd been asking himself. He could hear her inhaling, exhaling through her nose steadily, could see the tightness in her jaw.

His first instinct, as always, was to sugarcoat it—to give her the answer she wanted more than needed. But he was exhausted and his mind felt off, uneven; and there was something about the way Sakura was being direct with him, urgent instead of polite, that stopped him from doing so.

"I don't know," he whispered beneath a sigh, and then just loud enough for her to hear, "I don't know, Sakura. I guess we'll find out."

She watched as he scratched at the masked skin beneath his jawline before turning her eyes to the ground. "Kakashi-sensei, I don't—I've been meaning—"

"You two finished over there?" Tsunade called, halting the conversation in its tracks.

In an instant, Sakura stood up and let it dissipate entirely, smoothing her hands against her white scrubs. "Yes, shishou."

Kakashi closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and then followed suit. They weren't even close to finished, but now was absolutely not the time. "Yes."

"Alright, then," the Godaime declared firmly, opening the door with a loud metallic shriek of its hinges. "Bring him in."

.

.

He hadn't actually laid eyes on Sasuke in years, so when the ANBU guards escorted him into the procedural room, Kakashi was taken aback. Now, as he walked into the room guided by the operatives behind him, it was as if he were an absolute stranger.

And to Kakashi, he may as well have been.

The surprising part was not that he had grown—that much was to be expected. It was more that he no longer looked like a boy in any sense. No longer did Sasuke look like his brother—thin and lean, somewhat feminine in how he carried himself, quietly foreboding in a way that was apparent in the eyes more than anything. In his place was a man with wide shoulders, a distinct frown to his straight mouth, and height that surpassed both Neji and Naruto, the two agents escorting him. Dark hair, long enough to reach past his chin, obscured the rinnegan in his left eye.

The overhead lights had been turned off and the medic-nin were already in place, kneeling at each corner of the sealing area where small torches had been lit. Shizune and Sakura stood by the wall adjacent to the doorway, situated so that they would be facing Sasuke to watch the entire process. Tsunade and Kakashi stood on opposite sides of the area.

"Sasuke," Tsunade greeted with a formal tone.

"Godaime-sama," he replied with that same bored-as-ever voice, only slightly deeper than Kakashi remembered.

"Let's get started, shall we?" The woman meant business, and the room went silent in response.

When Sasuke stepped forward, Neji came to stand at the head of the area, posture rigid. It was no secret how much he disliked Sasuke, but without Kakashi's sharingan his byakugan was a necessary component.

Naruto made to stand by Shizune and Sakura, but Tsunade stopped him at once.

"No. You take Kakashi's things to the guards and wait for orders at headquarters." In the end, Kakashi had to shed his vest and headband—the metal could cause an interference that he wasn't willing to chance. Shizune came forth and handed Naruto the neatly folded items, which he took with as much hesitance as if they were poisoned. Even behind a mask, anyone could tell he was confused.

"Wait, why?" he whined, disappointed. "I thought—"

"Your signature is too powerful. It'll disrupt the entire process."

"But you were—"

"Go," Sasuke commanded suddenly, looking at Naruto with his dark, unobscured eye. Kakashi realized that this was the first time he'd made eye contact with someone since entering the room. A tension fell over everyone, thick and tangible for a full minute, before Naruto did as he was told and sulked out. The sound of the door echoed when it closed behind him. No one acknowledged that it had been slammed shut.

"Enough chitchat," Tsunade said when none of them moved. "Shizune, take his robe."

She did, which left Sasuke standing in nothing but a pair of black undershorts, stark against his almost blindingly pale skin. There was nothing to show for his sealing besides a small dark circle at his solar plexus. Despite not having expendable chakra, he'd clearly been training—his body was strong and well-muscled, his posture impeccable and poised in that certain way only skilled ninja could achieve.

As much as he didn't want to admit it, the sight didn't strike Kakashi well. Even if Sasuke had been training for the original date he would reacquire chakra access, he looked powerful in a way that wasn't reassuring. _Revenge. Revenge. A whole clan slaughtered._

Sasuke came to the middle of the sealing area and promptly laid down over Kakashi's calligraphy, effectively ending his train of thought. Everyone else shifted, preparing themselves. He and Tsunade were the last two to crouch into kneeling positions.

The floor was cold on Kakashi's knees, even through the fabric of his sweatpants, and it sent a shiver up his back. He ignored the aching in the joints of his fingers, likely preemptive from the anticipation of what was coming. He did not look at the faces of those around him, especially not those of his former students. Especially not at Sasuke's. He only looked at Tsunade when she poised the first hand seal of the process before her chest.

Kakashi copied her movements. His chakra thrummed in every limb and muscle, building and flowing, ready for whatever would come. And then came the glow from the ground beneath him, and there was no turning back.

.

.

 _"_ _Fuck,"_ he whispered sharply, hissing through clenched teeth, and decided it was time to leave the stall. He'd stopped vomiting a few minutes before, but a violent roll of nausea still burned in his stomach and threatened to claw its way out of his throat.

The door squeaked and echoed as it thumped against the inside. The bathroom was small and empty, not well lit at all. It was a typical ANBU setup. Kakashi yanked his mask further down his neck, splashing cold water in and around his acid-coated mouth, and braced himself against the sink's counter.

For whatever reason, it hadn't worked. And it had been brutal. Despite Sasuke's attempts to bite the bullet, to grit his teeth and bear the pain, there were times when it was too acute to be tolerated in silence. No wonder Tsunade had only wanted to give him back half to start with—save for the obvious.

Kakashi was grateful for her reasoning. Mentally, more than physically, he wasn't sure he would have made it through the rest. He just wished it had fucking _worked._

It was like every bad memory had resurfaced with the screams. Every time he'd performed a seal on Sasuke. His hand pummeling through Rin's chest, her heart still beating around his fingers. Obito disintegrating right before their eyes like he'd never been human. Sasuke nearly slaying Sakura before Kakashi had barely managed to interrupt. Sasuke charging at him with cold, murderous intent. Getting the news of Asuma's death. Minato and Kushina's memorial service. His ANBU teammates mutilated to death. His father with a blade through his stomach, sticking out of his back like an exposed bone, coated thick with blood and wrong, wrong, all wrong.

He'd held it together until the medic-nin took an unconscious Sasuke to the recovery wing and Tsunade had sent everyone out, her furious frustration barely managing to stay at a simmer. Once most everyone had left the room, Kakashi had practically sprinted here with an all-consuming need for quiet and escape. He didn't even realize he'd gotten sick until he was left empty, dry-heaving.

He refused to look in the mirror. He didn't need to know what he looked like. All he did was rinse his mouth out, over and over until the nausea rose in another potent wave and made him stop immediately.

Once he caught his breath, he pulled his mask back into position and headed out of there with a plan to go back to his apartment and sleep it all into nothing.

But he hadn't noticed Sakura's signature there. Not until he found her standing in the hallway, at least. Her skin looked a bit pallid; her eyes were dull in the gray, chilly hallway, but they snapped up to him the second the door swung open.

"Kakashi-sensei," she breathed like she couldn't get it out fast enough. "Are you—did it damage—"

"No." He had to clear his throat. There was no use trying to lie about feeling like shit if she knew there was something wrong. "It's nothing. I, uh…think I just ate something bad."

"I have some medicine for that, if you want." She stepped closer, an urgency in her voice. "You won't even have to go to the hospital. It's at my house."

Kakashi could almost _feel_ his bedsheets, taste the sleep he needed more than anything. "Really, don't worry about it, Sakura-chan. I can probably just sleep it off. It's—"

"Sensei, listen, I—I need to talk to you."

The hand she placed on his forearm made him freeze.

"Please," she said on the edge of a whisper. The image of her before the procedure—which now felt like it'd happened days ago rather than a couple of hours—sprang to his mind, and he took in how clearly she was trying, the difficulty with which she was keeping herself composed. His eyes felt tight at the corners.

"Okay."

"Really?" He hated himself for the amount of surprise and relief evident in her face. "You'll come with me?"

With a slow surrender of a nod he made his decision. "Lead the way."

She dropped her hand, exhaling in one great breath, and started walking beside him. He felt himself breathe again too.

.

.

Her apartment was decorated in a far less dainty manner than he would have imagined, if he ever had. It was clean and tidy to be sure, but most of the furniture was comfortably secondhand; the blankets and pillows were feminine but worn in a cozy way that his own belongings lacked. Rather than charming, his were just…old.

Her ceiling fan spun in a perfect, dizzying circle, swirling cool air over him where he sat on the sofa. The living room was warm from a morning without air conditioning; it let a distinctly floral scent permeate the room, one his sensitive nose drank in with each breath. He guessed it was from the clean laundry hanging on the rack in the kitchen.

His breaths were measured to keep the nausea at bay, though they faltered a bit when the tea kettle started whistling. The smell of dried ginger joined the air as Sakura fussed around the stove, and then she reentered the den, setting a mug for him on the coffee table and joining him on the sofa with one of her own.

"Let that sit for a while," she told him, voice soft. "It'll be easier on your stomach when it's not so hot."

He nodded, offering a weak smile with his eyes. "Thank you."

Her fingers tapped slowly against her mug; the steam rose to her face in silky white tendrils. She tried to smile back, he could tell, but she wasn't good at hiding her feelings. She never had been.

"Do you want me to heal you a little? I have a good jutsu for curing throat inflammation after…getting sick."

"You don't have to do that," he declined in what was intended to be a polite way.

"I want to." She finally met his eyes. The expression there made his stomach clench in a way that had frighteningly little to do with feeling ill. It was determined, simmering with whatever she was holding back.

He could give her this, he reasoned. It would give both of them something to do; it would be something that dissolved some of the distance and the pressure of what was being left unsaid. She recognized the moment he gave in.

"Here. Lay down." Sakura rearranged herself on the table when he slowly stretched out, then set her mug beside his untouched one. With a glowing hand, she took one of his, sending a tentative line of chakra down his wrist and up toward his chest.

It was hard not to watch her work, even if it was for something relatively minor. This was her element. The control came so naturally to her, and the healing was a perfect way to balance her tender heart with her strength. He remembered thinking the same thing years ago during the war. Even when everything was pure chaos, she held her own; when she'd fought as hard as she could, she still pushed herself to heal everyone else, himself included.

"You know this technique tells me how people get injured or sick, right?"

In another situation, she would have been teasing him. But here, all he could do to focus on the way her chakra seeped through his muscles, his spine, his throat, and not what lay beneath her question.

"I've been wondering," Kakashi began instead. "Why do you heal from my arm if you're healing something else?"

If she called bullshit, she didn't say so. "Honestly, I wasn't sure if you'd be comfortable with me making direct contact."

"Ah." He tried to match her sheepishness—she was right, after all. The hazy memory of her healing his infection all those months ago came to mind; he'd been far too gone to be uncomfortable with the contact then.

She was quiet for a little while then, her fingertip a gentle but steady weight against the inside of his ink-stained wrist, her chakra dissipating the traces of burning nausea as it passed.

"Was it because of the sealing?"

Kakashi knew he couldn't avoid talking about it forever. Not when it was so present in his own thoughts. It didn't mean he _wanted_ to talk about it. "Must've been. I'm not quite as adept at handling these things without a sharingan."

A strand of hair fell into her face when she nodded, curving under her chin.

"I'm…" Eyes closed, she drew in a wavering inhale. "I'm worried."

 _I know._ It wasn't exactly what he wanted to say, but it was his first reaction. It would work on enough levels to encompass his meaning. Or so he hoped. But she beat him to the punch before he could respond.

"I knew it wasn't going to work."

Kakashi felt his stomach lurch. "What do you mean?"

"I just…had this feeling." Her fingernail traced a nervous pattern on his skin, one she didn't seem to be aware of. "Medically speaking, it should have been fine. Your chakra attached to him without a hitch, too. I'm not sure what went wrong, but it should have worked. It's probably the rinnegan."

He had no idea how to respond to that, not when his heartbeat was quick at the base of his throat.

"Don't you think that's some kind of sign?" She'd finished healing him by now; her chakra left his system with a soothing ebb. "I think we're all just expected to trust him now, and I know that I'm supposed to believe in Tsunade-shisou's position on all of this." Her thumbnail tapped his palm one, twice. A third and fourth time. "I trust her more than anyone, but I haven't felt right about any of this. This is different."

He closed his eyes, too. _Say something. Anything._ But he wasn't sure what he could say without it all spilling out.

Sakura dropped his hand into her lap, no longer holding it. "He's not the same person anymore. It's like…like Naruto completely grew up, and he learned so much and harnessed all that power into something unbelievable, but he's still Naruto. And I like to think I've grown up, too, but sometimes I still feel like the exact same girl I was when I was ten, or twelve, or sixteen."

A phantom pain bloomed against Kakashi's chest, one that was strongest during the war when he saw just how much they'd all grown and changed, knowing he'd had no part in it. He'd been proud of them without having any right to be. It was when he'd so blindly hoped that they could still function as a team; that their growth and youth and optimism would bring all three of his ex-students back together the way Sakura and Naruto had wanted more than anything. The way Tsunade was convinced they still did.

But Sakura was right, and he knew that what he'd been telling himself all along was right too—things had changed too much.

"I just…" she continued, breaking through the silence, "I don't know how we're supposed to deal with him."

He wished he could find a way to be reassuring. He wished he could tell her something that wasn't a product of his own worries or the surge of bad memories he was battling every second of today. It was difficult, though, when he didn't even know how to help himself. There was only one thing he knew he did best.

"We just do," Kakashi found himself saying, voice low in his chest. "We deal with it like everything else."

Her eyes, intensely green, flickered up to his beneath her lashes. "How?"

"Like any other mission or fight. We come up with what strategy we can, and then figure it out as we go."

This seemed to surprise her a little, or at the very least made her grow more thoughtful. Kakashi watched as she blinked a few times, as a crease appeared beneath her forehead seal, as her gaze went vacant and she processed whatever conclusion she'd come to.

"I know you're right, I do. But still—"

Both of them paused as a chakra signature registered, one that was approaching the front door at a pretty good pace. Already tense, Kakashi stiffened, poised to either defend or escape depending on who it belonged to.

"Ah," Sakura said to herself, "that'll be Ino. She's probably coming to see if I'm alive after the procedure."

It was meant to be a joke, he knew, but Sakura grew despondent quickly after speaking.

Kakashi understood why. He still sat up.

"I'll just be a minute." She carefully set his hand on his leg, asking him to stay and finish their talk. There was no way she'd be satisfied with just that, especially when they'd been interrupted. If it hadn't been today…if it were any other day, he wouldn't have found himself being such a cowardly piece of shit. But by the time she was at the door, he was already standing, looking for his pack before remembering it was still with Naruto.

"How'd it go? You okay?" He heard Ino at the front door, making her way in without any other ceremony or greeting. "Wait—who's here?"

Kakashi was gone before either her or Sakura could find him in the living room. The only indication of his presence was the tea mug he hadn't touched, though was starting to wish he had.

.

..

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	3. Chapter 3

**a/n:** sorry for the delay! my computer randomly died for good and i'm now using my brother's ten-year-old laptop, which has been...an adventure. also, i lied-there will be five (5) parts to this prequel instead of three. keep ur eyes peeled for those in the next couple of weeks.

* * *

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 _you live in my cavities_

 _empty spaces of my body_

 _your voice, your memory_

 _planted deep_

 _a pit inside me_

 _._

 _._

 _._

Sakura had never wanted to join ANBU. And if fate were on her side, she would never have to.

The biggest reason she didn't want to have any part in it was that it would take her away from her work at the hospital, the aspect of her life that fulfilled her on the most basic but perhaps most necessary level. She'd have little to no time for throwing herself into research, into surgeries or the odd jobs for Tsunade, into unearthing new ways to approach kekkei genkai and healing shinobi and civilians alike. In an organization like this one, there was far too much red tape to perform even simple tasks without obtaining permission first—not to mention that she would be at the mercy of superiors who had little regard for personal matters. She wouldn't sacrifice the freedom she had now for a life like that.

The other reason was deeper, one she felt down to her core. One she never wanted to admit to. It was fear.

She knew, besides the obvious need for discretion, why no one ever talked about their time there. Not Kakashi. Not Sai. Not Yamato. Not even Naruto. Sakura had always known the former three to be rather subdued individuals, all with a distinct lack of outward or visible emotion, but Naruto…Naruto was different. He was extremely open and still stayed his true self no matter how jading the fight or the truth that sometimes hit him in the face.

But she'd been able to tell since he joined nearly two years ago that he'd changed. Even if it was by the smallest amount, only enough to see if one were really searching for it, whatever he'd seen had stolen some of his optimism and light. And that was what truly unnerved Sakura—it made her angry, too, but more scared than anything. If something could shake Naruto, the most resilient and unequivocally good person she knew, then she wanted nothing to do with it other than to be there waiting when he returned from missions.

As she was guided down the headquarter's shadowed corridors, she was reminded of exactly why she turned down their offers time after time. There was a forbidding, culty aura to this place, its dark, cramped hallways and cloaked operatives, the strange formality required to retain the anonymity of said operatives. And, of course, there was the lack of courtesy to outsiders. The one showing her the way she already knew had hardly acknowledged her presence since she arrived—it wouldn't have surprised her if they simply happened to be headed the same direction.

The further they walked, the more claustrophobic Sakura was starting to feel, especially with the dim, purple-tinged fluorescents dotting the way with only enough light to see the person in front of her. It agitated her—she was already so antsy about why she was here, and none of this smoke-and-mirrors bullshit was helping.

"How much longer?" she asked, trying not to hiss. "He's practically in critical condition, so every second counts."

"Incorrect," they replied in a muted voice. "He's been stable since he was brought into the facility."

Sakura wanted to roll her eyes, but they were right. She couldn't get anything by them. Instead, she settled for silently marching along the path with thoughts whirring hotly in her head.

This had been a remarkably awful week, and not just by her own standards. This whole situation seemed to have gotten the better of everyone. Naruto was extremely down about the fact that the procedure hadn't worked and had been pestering her left and right for updates she didn't have—no doubt he was trying to break down every door of this building to get information. Tsunade was angry, _pissed_ , and was scouring archived texts and drinking sake with a swift, burning desire to finish what she started. Kakashi, who had gotten physically ill from the sheer intensity of the operation, had disappeared since he left her house that day. It was like he'd vanished into thin air, elusive as ever.

Sasuke hadn't woken up yet, and it had been three days.

And Sakura herself had been tense as hell, because not only was it her responsibility to help fix something this unbelievably delicate, but it was her responsibility to do it for Sasuke. She still had no idea how to feel about it—but judging by the sleepless nights she'd been enduring and constant line of worry threading itself through her chest, it wasn't pretty.

The operative stopped short and she walked right into them. Their masked face turned on her sharply, almost as if to reprimand her, but Sakura didn't care. They'd arrived where they were supposed to.

"You may enter," they said brusquely. "Our medic is inside—"

"They better not be," Sakura instantly fired back, glaring up at the shadowed eyes behind the bird mask. "Sasuke isn't a member of ANBU or one of your prisoners. He's only in here because of Tsunade's orders." It was for privacy's sake, yes, but also because of his sentencing. He would be monitored and guarded around the clock here. That, however, did not include the time she was supposed to be evaluating him herself. She ignored the growing lump in her throat. "This is _my_ patient. Not yours."

"Haruno-san, if you have a problem—"

She interrupted them by opening the door and stepping inside the room. It was white, blindingly so, and sterile. Stainless steel equipment tables. Monitoring machines. No windows. A bed in the middle with an unconscious Sasuke in the center. An unwelcome ANBU medic standing beside it.

"Out," Sakura barked. She was not in the mood for this—she hadn't been kidding when she said every second counted. This needed to be solved sooner rather than later. "I'm under direct orders from the Hokage herself, so you need to leave and let me do my job."

The agent, this one in a fox mask, stood their ground. "I'm here to observe and report only. You may proceed as you wish."

"What I wish is for you to get the hell out of here."

Sakura stared at them, their eerie figure gray and hauntingly still in such a harshly bright room. It was so silent for a moment that she could hear the faint buzz of the fluorescents in the ceiling.

"Kitsune," the operative behind her finally said, neutral but firm. The one in the fox mask made no move to budge for a moment, but then they responded and walked toward the door where she was standing. Once they were passing her, they turned to her. The eyes in the mask were too dark to see as they stared down at her, and for a second, she wondered if this was someone she knew.

"Don't forget that we have other ways to monitor you, Haruno-san." Their voice was low, clipped. _Yep,_ she thought. _Definitely personal._ "I'll be waiting outside for your report regardless."

"Fine by me," Sakura replied with a tight smile, motioning toward the door. She made sure to shut it completely once the agent joined the other in the hallway. A sigh escaped her lungs so fast that it shook in her chest.

She took in Sasuke's condition as she leaned against the door, palms pressed to the cool metal behind her back. From what she could gather at this vantage point, his pallor was healthy; his heart rate was indeed stable as the first operative had mentioned. From what she'd studied of Tsunade's official diagnosis his brain function was normal as well. This unconsciousness was either from the severity of the pain induced by the operation or from his body rejecting foreign chakra. If she had to hazard a guess, it would be that both factors played a part.

Her pulse was hollow where in rang in her eardrums. She couldn't believe that she was here, alone with him, for the first time in what felt like an eternity, and that she had to heal him like this. It was like the world was playing some long, awful joke on her. The space between her ribs twisted with each step she took closer to his bed.

There weren't many wires hooking him up to the machines, and there was just enough space for her to slip behind the bed frame to stand at his head. He was so tall now that his feet nearly hung off the other end; his shoulders were broad and his chest was rising and falling steadily. It wasn't strange to see his face like this—neutral, smooth, passive—but it felt weird to be able to stare at him in this capacity. She could see the bluish webs faint beneath the pale skin of his eyelids, their lashes black and feather-light, his straight brow.

To see him look vulnerable like this, she realized, was something else entirely. It reminded her of a day she wouldn't wish on anyone.

Threads of chakra, gossamer and green, were alight at her fingertips once she stopped thinking long enough to summon her energy. She noticed how they cast a ghostly sheen in his dark hair when she slid it off his forehead and back toward his pillow. _God,_ she hated this, hated the way an infinitesimally small part of her still acknowledged that this was the boy she'd loved with so much of who she was. That she remembered exactly how his hair felt—thick, glossy black, slipping over her skin like ink in water. She _hated_ it. She couldn't let it get to her, though, not when her fingers were at his temples and her chakra was seeping into his bloodstream.

Sakura had to close her eyes to try and map out those clusters of capillaries and veins around his eye sockets. Sasuke's chakra networks were the most complicated she'd ever been privy to. Even in sleep his pathways were rejecting her, thrumming hard with a suppressor that was already making sweat form at her brow, and she didn't know whether to credit the sealing jutsu or his lack of trust taking on a physical form.

She quickly determined that despite this, his brain function was entirely normal. His sharingan seemed fine, too, with dormant chakra humming at the back edges of his optic nerves. She winced when she noticed this—that flare before the unfortunate end of his operation must have felt like a straight dagger to the eye, and that was being generous. But right now, for all intents and purposes, the eye was fine, and thankfully she could say this with authority. The sharingan wasn't so unfamiliar to her—not when she'd had to learn how to heal Kakashi without the help of Tsunade back in the day.

The rinnegan, however, was a completely different story.

In all its glory, it was a truly frightening thing. Not only as a ninja but from a medical standpoint as well. Her fingers tapped reflexively against Sasuke's temple as she felt her chakra curve toward the nerves behind his left eye. There was this horrible sludge-like sensation that only grew worse as she got closer—like her chakra was coagulating, unable to spread into any of the thousand attachments to his nerves. A drop of sweat trickled down and ran over her cheekbone. Had Tsunade experienced this? Why hadn't she said anything?

She focused harder. There had to be some way around this, whether it was the sealing at fault or the eye itself. The village had so little knowledge of the rinnegan save for one of the corpses Jiraiya had sent back from Amegakure, and at that point they'd only been working with a dead one. There was no telling how much unknown was left to uncover here or what they would find when they did. She had to find something.

Something grabbed her arm with a furious snap. Her eyes flew open to find that it was Sasuke, jaw set as he held her hard enough to bruise. His own eyes were still closed.

"Get your fucking hands off of me," he spat, almost too low to hear. Sakura couldn't even process the fact that he'd woken up—she despised the way she'd flinched and was instantly determined to correct it.

"Do you want me to figure out the problem or not?"

He slowly opened his mismatched eyes, one plain black and the other that multifaceted ripple of foreign color. He scowled and closed them immediately after seeing her.

"Oh." He dropped his arm. "It's just you."

Anger boiled in her gut, bitter and hot, heating the blood that rushed in her ears. She could feel her forearm throbbing painfully where he'd grasped it.

"Yeah, it's just me," came her reply through clenched teeth. "May I continue?"

"Hn." That was as affirmative of an answer as she would get. She willed her hands not to shake against his skull. "How long have I been in here?"

She summoned her chakra again, that hum of energy stirring once more, and hoped that things would run more smoothly now that he was awake. "Three days."

His chest stilled in its rise, but he said nothing. The only noise in the room was the steady beeping of the machines, the cold whir of the air conditioner in the vent above her head. Every ounce of the air that pumped through it was like ice on the back of her clammy neck.

"Do you remember what happened?" Sakura asked after a minute, measuring her voice. Even if he didn't there was a good chance that he could tell it hadn't gone in their favor. Chakra flow was a pretty difficult thing not to notice. She couldn't imagine what it felt like to live without it.

"I'm assuming it was unsuccessful." His voice was muted. Tight. He definitely knew.

If this conversation were happening a few years before she would have done whatever it took to comfort him. Even if that meant having her words fall on completely deaf ears, ones that never seemed to care about anything she said; even though he'd left a bruise on her arm and dismissed her so easily in this moment, she would have made the effort. But now Sakura couldn't quite find the desire for it. And she wouldn't. The compassion was there—it always was, unfortunately—but now, it wasn't for him.

"Yeah." She sighed a bit sharply as her chakra found that thick, murky area behind his rinnegan again. "Tsunade is finding the issue so that we can try again."

"Then why are you here and not her?"

The way he asked was so inflectionless, so _insulting_ to her. She wanted to be stronger than this, but—but the hurt was so much fresher, so much rawer than she'd thought. Time and distance didn't help some things. She may not have cared enough about him anymore, but insulting her work was something she did not take lightly. Her fingers began to tremble despite her efforts to still them.

"I'm doing my job, Sasuke." The name tasted heavy on her tongue. Strange. A stranger was what he was, but yet not. In more ways than one, he was exactly the same as always—ungrateful, self-centered, cold. Sakura snapped her chakra back into her own system, leaving him flinching, grinding his teeth this time. She had enough ready for a report and that would be that. It'd be enough for the ANBU operative, though probably not enough for Tsunade—that bridge would have to be crossed when she came to it.

Right now, however, she needed to get out of here—out of this cramped, bleak room with Sasuke, out of this creepy fucking maze full of death and secrets and whatever other horrors lingered in these walls. She shoved her hands in the pockets of her medic's coat, shaking as they were, and made her way to the door.

The second she reached for the knob, Sasuke made this _noise_ from the bed. It was something like a scoff, so close to that pompous thing he used to do back when he could actually fight.

Something that said she was an idiot, incompetent. Weak. She didn't have to ask or even _think_ to know what he meant by it.

Her stomach twisted so violently in reaction that she was almost disappointed he couldn't sense chakra anymore—he would have found hers brimming at a disconcertingly rapid pace, ready to leave this room crumbled to dust in her wake. _He has nothing,_ Sakura had to remind herself, the too-fast rush of blood in her ears. _He has nothing to fight back with. Nothing to prove himself with. Not right now, anyway._

She exited into the dark hallway, kick-slamming the door shut behind her. The impact echoed through the chamber.

"Well?" Kitsune said expectantly from their place in the half-shadows, though they'd given her a pause in acknowledgment of her anger. _Good,_ she thought. _I hope they're scared of me._

"His condition is stable. That's all I have to report." She looked them dead in the black eyes of their mask. "And he's awake now, so have fun dealing with him."

Her pulse beat hard in her wrists as she walked away, coat billowing out behind her. She could sense a presence just behind her.

"I can find my own way, thanks." She wasn't being rude, per se, but manners had left the equation the moment Sasuke had woken up. The agent followed closely still.

"Protocol states that I'm to—"

"Your _protocol_ can kiss my ass," she growled, whipping around to face the one in the bird mask. "I'll see myself out."

And without another word, she broke into a dash, leaving in the exact same path she'd come in. The operative didn't follow her.

.

.

It wasn't until she'd made it back to the hospital that she started to breathe normally again—or at least attempt to. A moment alone in her closet of an office helped ground her; a trip to the coffee machine was a balm to the frayed ends of her senses. She sat on a bench in a quiet hallway of the geriatric ward, watching the steam rise off the top of her styrofoam cup of tea, the color seep and bloom into the water.

Sakura hated keeping things inside. She was so bad at it anyway—in one way or another, her feelings always found a way out. She'd always been the kind of person to cry, scream, hit her way out of whatever was bothering her so that she could create a line of sight toward a solution. Letting it out allowed more room for change, growth, acceptance; it gave her an opportunity to look for whatever lingered when the impulse and the initial wave of emotion were gone. The parts that mattered.

She'd been even more open back in her genin days. If she'd thought things were fucked up back then, back when Sasuke had left for the first time and Naruto was off training with his own sannin…she never would have come close to guessing that this would be where they ended up. Hope was a simple but stupid thing when it wanted to be—and when it came to Sasuke, it was probably the most misplaced and unwelcome it could ever be.

A sigh left her mouth. Bittersweet as they were, she missed those days when she was the only one of them left in Konoha. Some—most—were more bitter than sweet. She remembered days so similar to today where she'd felt so out of control and impossible. Like she wasn't enough. She'd broken her hands several times under Tsunade's tutelage and had gone home with ripped clothes and bruised legs more times than she could count, and with that kind of slow, painful progress—not to mention Tsunade's tendency toward blunt abrasiveness—feeling down was unavoidable.

It always seemed like just when she was about to sit down and pout, cry, and feel sorry for herself, Kakashi would appear out of nowhere. Maybe he'd be sitting in a tree near her training grounds reading, or he'd be passing her in the street on the way home, or he'd suddenly stroll down the hall while she rested on a bench like this somewhere in the hospital. He'd been here a lot those days because of his sharingan. It was strange to think he didn't have one anymore.

But he'd always made a point to greet her with those slow, lazy words of his— _hello, Sakura-chan—lovely weather we're having today, hmm, Sakura-chan?—_ or he'd pretend he didn't see her until she called out to him. Back then he had always seemed so quirky to her. He was this insanely talented man who did nothing but nap and read porn; he was a powerful ninja in every country's bingo book who bought girly shampoo to wash his dogs with. Odd as he was, though, he always knew how to lift her tender spirits, especially in those subtle ways of his.

She missed his placating head pats and the way he never treated anything like it was a big deal. He always made any situation seem possible. Small, even. She missed how he could minimize every worry she'd had about their team. How present he used to be—relatively speaking, of course, because it was in his own way. Just like everything else he did.

She sighed again, leaning back into the bench. He'd told her they would handle this. They would figure it out as they went. She remembered his steady stare, his even steadier tone. She would always, always believe him when he gave her that calm reliability.

Their talk the other day had been on her mind since he'd left, though, eating away at the corners of her thoughts. He had become so distant, so quiet and just… _tired._ If it weren't for how she could tell he'd lost some weight, despite his muscles being in good shape from whatever missions he'd been taking the last few years, she would have simply figured it was a result of Sasuke's procedure backfiring. But the knowledge that those missions were mostly ANBU-oriented…well, it didn't make her feel good. About anything. She'd been worried about him since he went on that extended mission last year. Sometimes she felt like all she did was worry. Like it was her only important role on their team.

She took a sip of her tea. _Ugh._ Too bitter. She wanted some honey but it didn't matter either way—not when she would likely be staying up all night in the archives searching for an answer she had no desire to find. Not on a personal level, anyway. On a medical level she was beyond curious.

Her uncomfortably cool hand found her forehead and brushed the loose pieces from her ponytail away. This was all starting to be far more than she'd bargained for.

 _And wasn't it always?_

"Saaakura-chan!" a chipper voice sang from her left, dissolving the cloud her thoughts were creating. Naruto.

So he'd bounced back already. Just like that. She should have seen that coming from a mile away.

He was traipsing down the hallway with his arms swinging at his sides; he wore his typical orange sweatpants with a jacket of the same color tied around his waist. She loved when he wore white t-shirts. They made his skin look even more tan than it was, healthy and brown, and made his hair and eyes look bright. Sunny. A few passing nurses smiled at him.

"Hey, you," Sakura said fondly. Naruto grinned, but it fell when his blond eyebrows knit together. He came to a stop beside her bench.

"What's wrong?"

There were a few negatives to being around Naruto. Not many, but they existed. For one, he had the energy of a child, so much that it bounced off the walls of whatever room he occupied, and that could get old very quickly when she wasn't in the mood to deal with it. Secondly, he was a particularly oblivious person—which was frustrating in its own right, but also meant that when he _did_ notice something, he wouldn't drop the issue unless satisfied with its resolution, or unless he could be sufficiently distracted out of an explanation.

A third, worst of all, he reminded Sakura of the things she had to hold inside. The few things, the _worst_ things, that had to sit and fester because she didn't have anyone to talk to about them or any way to erase them. The things that she couldn't tell Naruto because she didn't want to squash his optimism. Because she wanted not only to protect him, but herself.

"I'm just tired," she said, opting for neutral ground. He'd bring up Sasuke soon enough anyway. "You're not hurt, are you?"

Naruto's face crinkled. "Why would I come here for _that?_ I would've just gone to your house."

As she stood up, Sakura shook her head in amusement; she put her arm around his waist so that they could walk together. "Don't you see anything wrong with that statement?"

He shrugged and threw an arm across her shoulders. She basked in how warm he was and felt like he really was the sun, the way he radiated energy. "Eh, not really. I was gonna see if you wanted lunch, though."

"I probably shouldn't. Shishou will kick my ass if ANBU reports to her before I do." _Shit._ She hadn't meant to let that slip.

"Screw ANBU! And screw baa-chan!" he hollered in that raspy yell of his, arm tightening around her head. Sakura could smell the dried sweat in his shirt. "She m—min…what's that word? Like when she takes up all your time?"

"Monopolizes?" She watched his whisker marks move when he twisted his mouth. Thankfully he seemed not to have picked up on her fumble.

" _Yes!_ Monopolizes! Baa-chan literally monopolizes all your time." All of a sudden he stopped and stood resolute. "I'll go with you to report or whatever, and then I'll scream at her until she kicks us out, and then we're gonna go to Ichiraku. Just 'cuz I said so."

"Well, if _you_ say so, I'm sure shishou won't object." She rolled her eyes. "The screaming thing might work for you, Naruto, but not for me. She only kicks me out if I try to push paperwork on her."

"Then get some paperwork! Let's _go!"_

He was practically vibrating in place, blue eyes wide and urging. Sakura feigned annoyance and huffed, pulling him into a walk again.

"Come on, then," she said. "I guess it's worth a try."

And if it got her away from this disaster with the unsealing for a little while longer, she thought, then it absolutely was.

.

.

She couldn't avoid it for too long, however. And she knew the Hokage would be less than pleased by her absence this afternoon.

When focused, Tsunade was a force to be reckoned with. These were the times when Sakura saw how truly alike they were, how the comparisons between them were more accurate than she realized. Both of them wouldn't rest until they pinpointed where they problem lay and consequently worked themselves to the bone trying to force their way through it. They were both determined in that ardent, almost crazed way. The only difference was that Tsunade's fuel was alcohol—and with that came unpredictability.

Sakura hadn't seen the Hokage's office like this since before the Pein attack. Even during the war the office hadn't looked this much like a whirlwind had hit it. Empty sake bottles and untouched takeout boxes were perched on various surfaces, as much a part of the room as the sparse decorations the office had accumulated over the years, most of which sat overturned or knocked to the floor. They were as bad an omen as Tsunade standing on the balcony outside her office, hair completely disheveled, face in her hands.

"Sakura," she growled loud enough to be heard through the half-open door. But she didn't move. " _Please_ say you have something for me. Something that isn't a load of _fucking"_ —there was a pause, and she raked her painted nails through her hair. "Just—come here."

Of course, Sakura had already been wading through the chaos to get to her mentor. Wind whistled thickly in the narrow opening the door left, swallowing her when she pushed it fully open. She made a point to shut it behind her.

The railing of the balcony was cold to the touch, despite the early summer digging its heels into Konoha. Green was everywhere. The streets below were busy, pedestrians out shopping or going to dinner, C-rank ninja leisurely making their last deliveries for the day. Evening was falling. With it came the glow of street lamps, the faded halo of light coming from the office behind them as it diffused the bruised air of dusk.

Tsunade looked haggard. It was partly the youth-serum jutsu falling from fatigue, partly the alcohol, mostly the strain of inconclusive study. The pressure of the situation. The repercussions that would come with not succeeding. The shadows beneath her eyes were dark. A hand clawed through her lengthy hair again and caught in the tangles. The anger, the fury, the alcohol had faded, leaving an old, exhausted mind in its wake.

"Shishou," Sakura declared simply, quietly. Reporting for duty. Showing her concern. Broaching the hardest subject. All of them at once, and more. "He's awake."

It was silent for a long, long moment, but she knew she'd been heard. She tried to brace herself for whatever was coming.

"You felt it," Tsunade said lowly, foreboding, into the quiet. "Didn't you."

It wasn't just the wind that gave Sakura a chill. This was why Tsunade hadn't warned her about what was living in Sasuke's skull—because she'd already seen that at best, there was a very, _very_ slim chance of this whole operation succeeding—and that at worst, it was utterly impossible.

"It was...I can't lie; it was terrifying." She hated to admit it, but it was okay to be vulnerable here. It was okay. "I've never—not even with the _sharingan_ —"

"I know." Tsunade's amber eyes met hers, their depth far betraying the years she only seemed to have. "I know. I've been studying doujustu for so much of my life, Sakura, and even I don't know how to pull this off." They closed again as a line formed between her brows. "It makes me wonder how exactly we managed to seal him in the first place. Must have been some real dumb luck. I know I'm damn good at my job," she laughed humorlessly, "but…"

She didn't finish, but Sakura knew what was left unspoken. She knew because she felt it too. _I'm not good enough if I can't solve this._

"I understand what I'm missing, and I understand why." Tsunade's gaze was heavy. Serious. Grave. She directed it toward the streets below. "The sharingan, the byakugan—these are genetic mutations. Miracles. It's not just that we've had decades of access to them. We're lucky enough to be able to comprehend them because they naturally occur. Kekkei genkai naturally occur."

She watched her bite her thumbnail, chipping some of the red paint off, not even aware of the motions. Silence.

"But the rinnegan...it's not a human thing. We're not supposed to know it. _Fuck_ that logic, but it's true." She paused and let some vitriol smolder in her tone. "Sasuke knows that better than anyone. He understands this thing, more than likely, and he isn't going to share what he's learned."

Sakura understood that sourness down to her bones. The wind caressed her neck as it blew by, carrying the scent of food, life, impending summer. She wished she could enjoy it. Right now, she just felt ill and uneasy. Hating that she'd consider being fair about this. And so she wouldn't defend him, but facts were facts:

"He will if it means getting his power back."

One of Tsunade's perfect brows arched at her. "True." The word mulled in the air. "That is very true."

Sakura hesitated. She wasn't quite ready to go down the manipulation route—not with him. And not from herself. The words caught painfully in her sternum on their way to her throat. It wasn't that she didn't trust her Hokage. No, she trusted Tsunade implicitly. But she didn't want to do this. _Nothing_ about this situation was right.

It wasn't that it wouldn't be easy; that would never matter to her. It was that there was a block every single step of the way, and they were blocks that not only couldn't budge, but refused at their deepest, most central levels to reveal themselves. Tsunade was correct: there had to be a reason why.

There was this cold thread of fear that was waiting in the shadows, waiting to jump and overtake Sakura at the slightest slip of her guard. She had faith in herself, but she didn't have faith in all of this working in their favor.

It was right then, though, that she remembered her team.

Naruto. His undying loyalty. His perseverance. His capacity to love, and to try, try, always try. How much she loved him. The lengths she would go to to make him happy.

And Kakashi. She remembered his patience. The wise, sure way he was resigned to this decision. How he'd told her they would figure all of this out. But most of all, she remembered that he wasn't sure how he felt about it, and his willingness to stay the course anyway. _I don't know, Sakura,_ he'd said. _I guess we'll find out._

He would be there. Naruto would be there. She had to be there, too.

And if she agreed to be a part of this, she would do it right.

"I think we need to push harder, shishou," she finally urged, partly backtracking and partly moving forward with her conviction. It was conclusion she felt the most comfortable with: diving in headfirst, fully thrusting herself into her work. "I think we can get it if we just...if we push past that one area in there where the chakra jams up."

It was like the life had instantly returned to Tsunade. The gears were visibly turning in her mind. Like it or not, she knew Sakura was right. It was simply a matter of needing to hear it. To be enabled into it.

" _God_ , that's just so _dangerous,_ though." She pushed away from the railing, began pacing. "If that eye rejects us hard enough, our abilities could be permanently damaged. You felt that. I know you did. It was a warning sign, that blockage—you push far enough, you'll get bitten right in the ass. Hard."

"Are you suggesting that we don't at least try?" Sakura watched the silhouette of her mentor, backlit by her office's lamplight glow. She saw it stop and whip around to face her. _Bingo._

"I know what you're trying to do, Sakura. Don't think I don't." The smugness in that tone was amiable, fond, despite the lingering roughness in her voice. "There's not a chance in hell I'd ever say that if I were confident we could succeed. I'm only saying that we need to be extremely careful. More than we've ever been. We don't know what to expect, or what we'll find. If anything."

"I still want to try, though."

There was a long moment of nothing—no movement, no speaking. And then Tsunade began to step toward her with a slow, measured pace. Her face was visible again, halfway golden, softening the harshness of the day. The intensity there made Sakura self-conscious.

 _It's okay to be vulnerable here._

"Not for him, shishou. I just...I need to know."

 _It's okay._

"I don't—"

 _I don't want to be vulnerable, though._

"I need—"

 _I need to have this power over him._

The warm hand on her cheek stopped her, holding back the words she was already choking on with a short gasp of breath. It was rare that Tsunade was affectionate with her. It jarred her every single time.

"You don't have to explain." The thumb ran over her cheekbone. That fierce, unyielding gaze sent a message: _I know. And I understand._ Her hand moved to smooth over Sakura's hair. "Listen to me. I think that you should be the one to do this."

Sakura could have leaned forward to embrace her right then.

"But."

She could feel that hand holding the back of her neck, commanding full attention. "But?"

" _But:_ I am not letting you do this alone." Tsunade's beautiful face, even more so when the age was slipping through the cracks, was set in a quiet blaze, absolutely sure. "I don't feel right putting you at risk like this at all, but I know that if it can be done, you'll do it."

What remained simmering behind her irises was more like _You need this._ It wasn't even close to untrue.

"Okay. That's okay." Sakura couldn't smile, but the relief was clear in her voice, in the way she could breathe again. "I won't let you down, shishou."

"Oh, please." That drier note had finally returned to Tsunade's voice. "You couldn't if you tried."

With a wordless, resolute pat on her shoulder, their decision had been made.

Sakura would remember this moment days, weeks from now. How the night was wrapping itself like a blanket over Konoha, settling between the buildings and homes, in the rocky crags of the monument, on the concrete of their balcony with a lovely, welcome warmth. How Tsunade looked halfway to insanity, but never more focused; how funny that would be after they finally cracked this code and pulled it off without a hitch. How they were so blindly hopeful despite themselves, despite the looming danger that pulled at Sakura like phantom puppet strings. How they were so sure they could figure this out.

It would be the moment of clarity amidst the storm: the exact point in time that Sakura had decided to go through with this. That Tsunade was complicit in it. The moment that she had made the choice to permanently alter the course of their lives—and not just their own two, but those of everyone else involved.

It would be the moment that would offer her one single question, the smug hand of fate twisting its rise to the top of everything, the cruelest puppetmaster:

 _Can you live with yourself knowing what you've caused?_

 _._

 _._

* * *

(don't forget to review xox)


	4. Chapter 4

hi everyone! sorry for the delay and thanks for your patience. grad school is hard.

* * *

.

.

.

 _when your fragile world_

 _was crashing down around you_

 _you realized your place_

 _and the darkness_

 _that you've tried so hard to subdue_

 _it causes you to change_

 _._

 _._

 _._

 _Inhale._

She recalled first the light — that piercing flare of chakra, that otherworldly glow that wasn't really even a color. It was expected, that light, and it'd been a welcome sign, as intimidating as it was.

 _Exhale._

Then she recalled the way it blackened. How it sought his body like tendrils of death rising from some hell beneath the ground, merging onto his skin with a hot slap. How the ink they'd written on the ground melted, reconstituted, crawled along his skin in words too foreign to read anymore. How her throat constricted at the sight, and her eyes clamped shut, knowing she should just be concentrating on her job.

 _Inhale._

She'd matched her chakra wavelengths. She'd seamlessly merged her threads into the flow, holding her own as well as she ever had, and dove right into those infinities of pathways right around his eyes — she was nervous, but ready all the same. She would conquer it this time.

 _Exhale._

 _Go,_ she kept telling herself. _Go. Go. Push harder._ Sweat began to drip from her brow. He was sweating, too, which was making her grip begin to falter. She concentrated pressure to the fingers on his temples, not letting them move even a millimeter. That sludge — she could feel it so potently that she could almost _see_ it, thick and glossy and deep enough to suffocate in, coagulating her chakra. _Keep going. Keep pushing. Don't lose your nerve._

 _Inhale._

Pain — pain started to seep in. And it wasn't shy. She could feel him grinding his teeth, bearing it; she tried to do the same, refusing to lose. _Push, Sakura._ It could have been her, or someone else who'd said it out loud; she'd never know which. But it _hurt._ It felt like her chakra was being pulled from her body like a second skin, just as vascular, teeming with nerves that were shrieking and begging to be put back where they belonged. Everything was wrong. The sludge was boiling now, angry at the incursion.

This wasn't a healing, she realized.

This was an exorcism.

 _Exhale._

She thought she'd had it then. This thin gray thread of light seeped through the furious mass, a fleeting ease on one of her thousand strings of chakra, just the barest hint of another side. Something past this horrifying barrier. She chased that microscopic slip in the rage and ignored the tidal wave of nausea that came with doing so.

 _Stop resisting me!_ she wanted to roar at him.

But then, beneath her hands, Sasuke screamed.

 _Inhale._

The sound chilled her blood, but she had to keep going, no matter what. This had happened last time, too, and she should have expected it. She should have done it herself by now. There was a faint metallic taste in her mouth — her teeth had ground into some softer inside without her realizing what or when.

 _Exhale._

Her nerves were on fire, flaying her alive. _Don't scream. Don't lose._ At this point, she wasn't sure how much control Sasuke had over the situation, over the rinnegan. She concentrated even harder, feeling her chakra pulse down to her core.

 _Inhale._

That other side eluded her like it was sentient. She could feel her legs shaking, her spine tightening. Her eyes trembled behind their lids. _So close._

 _Exhale._

The muscles in her neck felt as if they were being pried apart, tender meat flaking from the bones. The sludgy mass was enveloping her chakra probes like a virus, spreading, bubbling, sucking at them with the intent to pull and drain. _So, so close._

 _Inhale._

The screaming was louder now, hoarse and raw. Her chakra stores experienced a very sudden dip, and the impact of it spread into her bloodstream, bruising every muscle in her body at once, the thumbs of it digging in hard. Pain. She thought she'd get used to it — but she — but it was worsening by the second. The strength of a hundred wasn't close to enough.

The nerves it hadn't reached before were lit now, a million birthday candles of excruciating pain, melting the soft, waxy lining of her organs. A sob welled up within her and choked its way out of her mouth.

 _Sakura!_ A voice she recognized. Tsunade. But she didn't look. Her closed eyes burned with hot tears, ones that streaked down her face in hard, solid succession. She was supposed to have called it if was going south, but that was the thing — even in the midst of this awful fucking hell, she didn't think to stop, not even for a moment. The concern she knew was there would only matter once she was finished with this.

Another cry escaped her. It was okay, though. She could do this.

 _Sakura,_ another voice called, closer, deeper, steady. Two hands urgently placed themselves on her back.

For a very short moment, their pressure on her shoulder blades was grounding; chakra started to flow from the palms, merging with her own wavelength, and with a sharp snap, it was like her head broke above the surface of a flood.

 _Exhale._

The pain dissipated just slightly, just long enough for her to regain her focus. Her power was amplified now, doubled with this second flow.

Sweat ran down her straining neck. The bloody tang in her mouth was bitter with drive. Like she could taste that other side, that bright inner world of the rinnegan. Her chakra was no longer overwhelmed by the darkness, lost in the roiling churn of that blockage — she could physically sense it starting to push through.

Between her hands, Sasuke was suffering worse than she'd ever known him to in her life. His pulse was out of control, high and wild and pumping unnaturally hard against her fingertips. His chakra was like molten steel, the way it blared and converged on her intruding forces. She knew just how much he was suffering. She knew. Even if it was threatening to make her sick. But she was too close to the end to take it to heart. And even if she hadn't been, she probably wouldn't have spared him this.

 _Come on,_ she repeated to herself. _Come on._ She kept at it, even though it hurt. Kept pushing.

And then she felt the barrier give.

It was the strangest thing, she thought at that very moment, how it had just fallen away. Easily, suddenly, like it had... _chosen_ to. Her heart, screaming its bloody pulses out, dropped at the feeling.

Gray light began to seep into the dark behind her eyelids. And the world went still.

If it was as if time itself had slowed to a near stop. As if her brain were functioning a thousand times over capacity just to see this happen in real time, to not let it pass her by in the merest instant flash. She waited. She waited for it.

What came to her first was the headrush.

It was nice at first, like a cool breeze soothing at her raw innards, the hot acid swimming through her brain.

And then it grew, slowly.

Then a little faster.

Then much _much_ faster, whirling into a hum so powerful she could feel it in her fingertips — a rush so tangible and heavy and rapid that it lifted her senses, her thrumming heart, rocked through her in a suprise climactic starburst. The overwhelming way it hit her was toe-curling, spine-tingling, enough that her breath became rapid and shallow. She wanted — _needed_ — more. And she chased it.

What came to her next, though, was not a relief, nor was it beautiful.

It was a horror.

The power was there, growing, consuming her threads with a thick, viscous tongue and dissolving them as easily as candy floss. The light was coming into her, obliterating each molecule in its path with a tiny explosion. Ravenous for more. Something stabbed hard into her brain and leaked, and she let out a contorted scream.

 _This is bad._ A low, sharp voice from the other edge of the white void. _Cut it off — get her to stop before —_

She couldn't make sense of what was invading her mind. It was blood, and it was hunger, and it was bliss, and it was terror, and it was everything. It was everything.

She melted, drowned in the liquid death of herself. Her skull splintered and let her brain and spinal fluid ooze out in droves of black sludge. Her eyes rolled out of their sockets, bursting capillaries, shining bombs of blood and innards, infinitely reforming and exiting the inside of her face to detonate and leave their broken, gelatinous yolks at her feet.

Her skin was melting, dissolving atom by atom, each millisecond a blinding fury of pain. The hands at her back pulled away from her, taking molten strings of her body with it. Her lungs were collapsing. Filling with fire and fluid. Bursting inside the remaining seams of the inflamed marrow of her ribcage.

She wasn't ready for it. That was what this was telling her. She wasn't ready for this bloodthirsty power, this godly knowledge she was looking to unfurl. It was as if someone had poured boiling, spattering, raging oil into a thin glass cup, letting it steam and coat and ravage and shatter from the inside with relish. And relish it did. She could feel the fierce, furious anger at the attempt of intrusion. The delight in her pain. The condescension of it gauging her inadequacy.

 _No. Not again,_ she thought, the only words in the remaining matter of her brain. _Not again. Not me._

And then the blackness swallowed her up in an instant, and that was it.

 _Inhale._

Sakura reminded herself to breathe.

To put her hands against the dense folds of her bedsheets and feel their borrowed warmth. To sense the way her lungs stretched around her breath. Still there, intact.

Healthy. Normal.

With a shaking limb, she reached for the bottle of liquor laying on the nightside table, feeling the sound of the glass dragging against the wood reverberate in the back of her head. She took a long, long pull of it, hyper-aware of the liquid scrape down the warped redness of her insides, how it went down easier with every gulp. Then she capped it, a careful hand setting it back on the table, and slunk down into her bed. The ache was everywhere. She still didn't have enough chakra back to heal herself — whatever she'd found inside that eye had extinguished her as inconsequentially as a lit candle. Even if she did have the ability now, she wouldn't know where to start.

It had been days since then, though she'd stopped counting after the third diluted sunrise. Who knew how much time had passed? She wasn't even sure if it mattered anymore. It hadn't worked.

Tsunade had warned her. Her own gut, every inch of it, had warned her. And yet she'd insisted on pushing, just like she always did. When would she learn? What would be enough to finally teach her to trust her instincts? To keep away from where she wasn't wanted?

A thin breath stuttered out from her chest. They couldn't end it here. They just _couldn't._ But she didn't know what to do. Sasuke's bone-chilling screams were phantom echoes in her ears, pressing through the faint darkness of her bedroom with dark, real, shadowed hands. One was threatening to close around her neck again, dragging her back down into the worst of it.

"You're alright," she said into the stillness of the room, grateful for the vibrations of voice in her chest and raw throat. It hurt to speak, but she did it again, and again: "You're alright."

If she said it loud enough, staved off the haunting long enough, she might just start to believe it.

.

.

She couldn't go back to work unless she had chakra to do her job. The menial tasks of disinfecting and giving stitches were basically extinct now, at least in this part of the village. There were still traditional medicine practices scattered around for civilians who preferred them. Or for ninja who wanted to avoid the hospital, where every injury went on their record. Anything she could do required chakra. Without it — until she bounced back from the incident — she was effectively useless. And she _hated_ it.

The only thing keeping her from losing her tenuous hold on her mind was the innate hum of energy at the core of herself. She'd know if that were gone. She had to believe it would resurface the way it was meant to if she just gave it time.

Chakra therapy, too, was Tsunade's suggestion. But Sakura had a feeling it was more for checking up on her and getting her out of the house than anything else.

 _What happened in there?_ Tsunade had asked her earlier, a glowing hand laid to Sakura's forehead, right at the opalescent seal they'd both earned, but was useless for now. _What did you see?_

Sakura braced herself on the lip of her kitchen sink, nausea running through her in a heavy, gusting beat. She hadn't known how to explain it — not even to the one person who was trying to understand. There weren't any words to describe what she'd seen. What she'd _felt._ It was the most sinister thing. There wasn't any way she could explain how terrified it made her — and not just of the rinnegan, but of Sasuke himself. What kind of power did he have locked away? What was he hiding?

She turned on the faucet and ran lukewarm water over her wrists. It dripped down her fingers, one by one, streams diving gently from the tips of her nails down the drain. Threads. Light. Sweat. Blood. With a frantic surge, she pumped soap into her palms, then mashed them together like a child learning to use its limbs. Her scrubbing was gruesomely slow, a scrape of nails against skin, slicing through the foam in a reddening rake. The water did nothing to soothe. It only washed away the soap, the bitter sting from the cracks of her too-dry skin, never cleaning what had found a home deep in every pore. If she'd had the chakra — if she'd had the means — she would have blown the skin clean off and grown it back herself, and no one would be the wiser.

Sakura knew she was unwell. This was plaguing her. Her hangover was a dull, aching staccato in her temples, roiling in her sour stomach, reminding her of what she was unable to forget.

She shouldn't — couldn't — keep this inside. It would eat her alive. Drag her into that black sludge. Make her drown, suffocate on her own death. It would do no good to anyone if she couldn't move along and find another way.

 _I won't give myself up for him,_ she'd told Tsunade, and more than once. The _never again_ was tacked on the end after the last time she'd slipped — the last time she would ever let herself. She'd come so far from then. Hadn't she?

The sink still ran as she stepped away from it. The daylight spilled in through her window, and she wanted to drink it, safe and clear and dim, to fill her body with its nothingness. She threw open the panes like they'd done her wrong by staying closed.

The day was halfway warm outside, overcast. Nothing special or remarkable. It couldn't commit to fully sunny or cloudy, fully hot or cool. Limbo. She gasped in air — in through her nose, out through her mouth, coating her blistered throat with it. She tried not to dry heave. _Then_ and _now_ were converging on her all at once — a truth she'd never wanted to face, and a horror she couldn't run away from. She needed her own exorcism.

A sob formed itself around her panting breaths, falling on the deaf ears of the people easily roaming the street below her apartment. Reality. It was incredible, impossible to believe that any of this could exist in the same world as one where people lived, and ate, and shopped for groceries, and had jobs and families and normal days to tend to. A world where a mother could roll her baby's stroller down a quiet street and not think about an incomprehensible darkness, biding its time some place where no one could truly ever touch it but the ones it chose to do so. An evil that smiled and laughed and waved as it shut its door on you. That mother could go home, and tuck that baby into its crib, and other people, ones who'd chosen this path for any number of reasons, would try not to be crushed under the weight of pure terror, and she would never know.

Sakura was desperate to open up the earth with her fists. She craved that satisfying crack of land by her own will, the way grass would rise and shred and fly away, scared of her strength. She needed to feel powerful and alive. She needed to know that she was feared, revered, bigger than all of this. But there was no chakra, and that meant nowhere to channel that need save for the hard bump of words around the inside of her mind.

She'd have to settle for talking, even if it was the last thing she wanted to do.

She leapt from the window in a heartbeat, not caring where she landed, so long as she did.

.

.

Her feet took her down that old familiar path, as if of their own accord, no thought or reasoning involved. Only intuition — finding what she needed at the very deepest part of herself.

This street — it was like a snapshot, a photograph worn at the corners. She felt like nothing had changed in ten years. Not the kindly elderly lady tending to the potted plants on her front steps. Not the second-story window of a neighbor's house, affixed with burgundy curtains behind the dusty, crooked pane. Not the group of cats chatting with each other on trash cans in a mildly sunlit alleyway. And certainly not the dark beige, chipped paint of the building she'd always recognize, always wonder about the life that happened in that one warm corner of the fourth floor.

Her hands shook, twisted into each other where they gripped the strap of her bag. The last time she was here...well, she just hoped what she found would be far better than that. Given recent events, though, she couldn't be too sure he was taking proper care of himself. Not that he would let that matter. He never let her check on him.

A worry or not, Kakashi was the person she needed to talk to the most. Not Tsunade, who was too driven by the motive to make things right her own way, or Naruto, who she loved with everything she was, but who could never understand what she needed him to. Kakashi was the voice of reason. The wisest person she knew. Their level-headed leader — whether he acknowledged that position or not. And he was close enough to the situation that he could tell her where to go, how to feel about it, without knowing the whole sad story. What he already knew was more than enough.

The door to his building creaked loudly. Old. And the inside was dull, unlit, save for the small spotted windows on each level. Sakura barely registered each floor as she walked inside and ascended to the next, instead focusing on the slow repetition of her feet on each upward stair. The wooden stairs groaned loudly, every single step echoing through the hallways of every floor at once. _Tsunade wants me to fix this,_ she would say to him, sitting on the sofa she remembered seeing the shape of in the dark. _At this point, I don't know if I can. I really don't know if I should._ She would know he was listening, patient, even if he wasn't looking at her.

 _Remember when I told you I was scared?_ Her mind immediately erased that version, started over. _Remember when I told you I was worried about all of this?_ Kakashi would nod, and it would reflect, hopefully, how he agreed with her sentiments. _Well, I...I'm definitely...now, I think this is definitely a bad idea. Nothing about this can have a good ending. But I don't know where to stop._

 _I know,_ he'd say, or something like it. He'd said that last time. He'd had a bad feeling about it all, too. But he'd also told her to have faith, that things would work out no matter what.

Normally, she would believe him. After seeing what she'd seen, though — now — now, she wasn't so sure.

What she wanted from him, today, more than ever, was the truth.

Life bustled behind the doors of every other apartment on the fourth floor. She could hear the different tones of conversation, some of music; she could smell frying meat and the homey, sticky scent of rice. It was an incomplete picture, though. Kakashi's apartment was silent.

She softly made her way to the door, then knocked on it, scuffing her feet against the faded doormat. Perhaps there had been a pattern on it, once, but now it was plain, and dry leaves stuck deep in the tiny spaces between dulled-out straw. She remembered this, in its exact way, from the several times she'd come here before.

The longer she waited for a response, the further her stomach slipped, freefalling. Something wasn't right. There was no sound behind the door, yes, but there was also no seal on it either. There had _always_ been a seal — even when he had been out on a mission for months — even when he was on the verge of death, fever high enough to curdle his brain, there had been a seal on his front door.

Sakura knocked again, this time with more force, frantic now. "Kakashi-sensei, it's Sakura."

She gave him a minute. Nothing.

"Kakashi-sensei."

Nothing but silence. Not even the clinking of dog tags on little blue collars. Even in her weakened chakratic state, she should have been able to sense him there.

She tested the knob. Locked. Her breath caught fast in her throat. She knelt down to pick it without even having a thought to the contrary.

The knob slipped beneath her sweating hands. The smell of unshined metal was as strong as blood, right before her face. _Eyes bursting in her skull. In his skull. Don't lose your hold._ She couldn't swallow around the sphere of panic that had lodged itself firmly in her throat. In other circumstances, this would have been a cinch, fiddling open this lock. Right now, it was taking her longer than usual, which only mounted her growing fear. The image of him before these last procedures — colorless, tired, not taking proper care of himself — came to mind. And then a whole wash of memories — infections, weeks in hospitals, untold pains and injuries. Kakashi's bed, the sheets stained dark, and his body in it, dirty, ill, dead.

The lock gave. She pushed her way in.

It was less dark inside than she was expecting. She still couldn't breathe. His apartment was dusty, filled with light from outside that baked at the worn floorboards. His sofa — she saw it now to be brown, a bit mottled, comfortable — was empty. The kitchen, its dated, coffee-stained countertops and tile floors, and the dog beds therein, were empty as well.

Sakura practically sprinted into the bedroom, where the door was open, as if inviting her in with a taunt. _Blinding light. Death smiling at me._ Her pulse was a pounding ache in her jaw.

She closed her eyes, bracing herself by the entrance. And then she opened them, letting the light back in.

His bed was empty.

She exhaled, holding herself up with hands to her knees. Not quite relief, not absolutely, but something close enough to it.

The bed itself was slightly rumpled, but the sheets were a uniform yellowed white, showing their years, the comforter a muted green. It suited him. More importantly, they were free of any bloodstains.

She didn't remember this from the last time she was here — not the sheets, nor the shelf beneath the window that lined the wall above his bed, home to a healthy potted plant whose leaves branched down near his pillow. The room was hardly decorated otherwise. Neat, but only because of its minimalism. Even the desk was free of papers, save for a scrap of one:

 _Pakkun - out for the day._

 _Food shopping for you and the boys._

 _Be back later_

 _Happy saturday_

"Sakura-chan?" a gruff voice called from behind her. She whipped around, heartbeat skyrocketing with a gasp.

Pakkun, in all his expressive glory, was standing in the doorway. The nostalgia she felt upon seeing him — the well of uneager joy —

"Oh, _Pakkun,_ " she whimpered, walking to him and bending down to gather him in her arms. He was stiff against her shoulder and hair, paws scrabbling and scratching in confusion, but he was warm and real, and there. Her face found the dense folds of fur and fat around where his neck met the rest of him. She breathed in that musky scent of dog — she used to be able to smell it so distinctly on Kakashi, back in the days when they still took missions together. "I'm so glad to see you."

"It, uh, sure has been a little while." He wheezed ever so slightly. "You okay, kid?"

That question alone made her want to cry. But she wouldn't. She settled for letting the emotion whirl in her gut, the ugly weight of a stone.

"Why can't I feel your chakra?" The words were a long, scraping choke. Pakkun sniffed at her hair.

"Dunno. Somethin' happened a couple of days ago where we all felt a disconnect. Like someone had cut a cord. It's still there, but…" He wriggled, uncomfortable. Sakura let him return to standing. "He never really told us what was goin' on. Only said it was fine, even though his chakra was out. Haven't seen much of him since."

It was the answer she should have expected — that he wasn't here. It was not the one she wanted, though. And not the one she needed. But she never prepared for the inevitable, did she?

No time to think of it. A memory snatched her in an instant.

 _Sakura._ Calm and low, with steady hands on her back. Chakra pulling her out from the flood. The spiteful snap of clarity — _Like someone had cut a cord_ — the pain bleeding from it, hemorrhaging. _It's still there, but…_

He had helped her. Kakashi had helped her during the operation, had helped her force her way into where she didn't belong, and now he was paying for it too.

The note from his desk was crumpled in her palm, the paper old enough for the edges to be soft, pliable. Her fingers trembled around it.

"When is this from?"

Pakkun's eyes were deep dark, rimmed in milky white, shiny, droopy, the way they'd been since she first met him. So unlike a human's, but with all the world of thought and feeling of one as they stared at her.

"Today, Sakura-chan." He sat on his hind legs. "He's okay, you know. I'd tell you if he wasn't."

One of her hands found her face, smoothing over her brow with pressure. She shouldn't be here. She shouldn't even know that he was out, or how he was doing, because that was how they operated. She worried ceaselessly while he lived his own private, separate life. He wouldn't want her here, would he?

If he'd answered the door — if he'd been in this room, sleeping, or maybe staring out the window, then yes, he would have talked to her, and she would have felt better, perhaps. He might have told her he'd seen what she'd seen, that he had felt that same living death, and it was fine. But she was lying to herself if she thought that this was the way to resolve things. She couldn't keep running to her sensei. She couldn't keep running to her shishou, or her best friend, or even to the problem itself, throwing herself back into the current until it died.

There was only one way she'd be able to fix what was ailing her, and it was alone.

"Thank you, Pakkun." She scratched the crest of fur between his ears. "Don't tell him I came here, okay? Please?"

The folds of his curmudgeonly face did not seem convinced. He held her gaze for a moment, and she nodded, holding back tears she desperately wanted to cry.

"Alright," he said finally. "Alright, then."

.

.

The Uchiha compound was the stuff of nightmares. Desolate, empty, scarred by bloodshed and hate. Mania. Loss. The buildings were completely intact, but windows were shattered, walls graffitied with black and red. _Killers,_ most of the words read. _Cowards. Good riddance. Fucking murderers._ It was a graveyard, still barely breathing, demons dying slowly somewhere deep beneath the ground.

It was no place to live, not for anyone. Not even its ghosts. It was loneliest place in the universe.

Sakura tried not to recall the last time she'd walked through this quiet wasteland — in absolute solitude — no lamplight to guide the way home — _stop._ She tried not to look over her shoulder as the wind crawled through the spaces between homes, chilling her to a shiver. _It's okay._ She tried not to let her hands shake, her mouth quiver, as she found the road to Sasuke's house.

It wasn't his childhood home — he'd told her that much. She'd never seen that place, would never have context for the place where his parents were killed. And that was best. He carried it with him everywhere he went regardless. This place was quiet, plain, its facade gray and spotless, eerily so among the wasteland surrounding it.

Sakura froze once it was in sight, suddenly feeling small. She should have told someone she was coming here. Someone could have — known where she was? Held her accountable? What? She could hear his screams again, feel them crawling into ever pore. And then another, deeper thing surfaced — she could feel his breath against her mouth — _This is what you wanted._ She felt her weakness then, her weakness now, and how much she wanted her power back. _Keep going. Keep pushing. Don't lose your nerve._

There were ghosts here, though, despite it all. And one was on the roof of this stranger's house, staring at her from over its shoulder, eyes piercing into her feet and spine, locking her in place. There was no turning back from it now.

Sasuke was a spectre, tall and looming where he stood. One black eye and white skin. Black clothes and hands as pale as bones by his side. Terrifying. Beautiful.

Sakura swallowed. Adrenaline trickled beneath her tongue, sickening and cloudy. She'd seen him like this a thousand times, always standing between the forest and the sky, so far away but close enough to shoot daggers into her, make something hot and fierce bloom in her gut.

Neither of them moved.

Time stretched, amplified in that long moment, eyes locked and unwavering, ends of a magnet. Unwilling and unable to close the warped void between. She had no idea how long she had been standing there, how long she would have to before —

"What?" he said finally, loud and sharp enough to draw panicked flights from whatever few birds resided in the forest behind him. Even from her place at the front gate, she could hear every syllable of the word clearly enunciated. He hadn't needed to raise his voice, though. The furthest real noise was several miles away.

Her heartbeat was hollow, nauseating at the base of her throat.

"Get down here," she called out. The sound of her own voice almost surprised her. "I'm not going to talk to you like this."

 _You will not be above me. I will not be beneath you._

Sasuke only stared, eyes like the edge of a blade. And then he turned, disappeared from sight, slinking off the roof to land somewhere behind the house.

Her pulse thudded hard, each second he was out of her sight another reminder of the days before now. As he finally came around the house, walking with a straight back and lithe steps, she imagined him coming to her calmly, snapping her neck with his bare hands. One palm on her shoulder and one at her scalp, her tongue choking the last of her breath out of her mangled throat. Killing her in one fell swoop.

Sakura met him halfway.

She was grateful for her instinct not to approach the house any more than she was choosing to in this moment. The open space — the open gate behind her — she needed them for this to work.

The wind picked up again, spirit-thin, and she closed her eyes against it, against Sasuke in front of her.

 _Do it. I dare you._

"You smell like a hospital," she said instead, opening her eyes. Cold cotton and antiseptic. "When did they release you?"

His gaze was flinty, unnerving, stone-smooth and solid. He was so much taller now, even taller than Naruto. Broader, too. Strong.

"Does it even matter?" At least his tone was the same as she'd always known, that same flat affect. Still, it bristled her.

" _Yes,_ it matters." Her arms tightened all the way down to her fists. "I'm the one who has to make sure this works, so I need all the details of your treatment. That's been made explicitly clear to you more than once. So unless your memory was affected during —"

"I remember," he said, and suddenly they were back in every place they'd been before. Orochimaru's lair. The front gates of Konoha. The hospitals and battlefields where she'd tried, forever, to help him. Her following behind him, chasing his back every time. Him charging toward her, the intent to kill, the intent to disillusion. His hand through her chest. His breath on her mouth. His palm against her bare stomach. His —

"I'm telling you that it doesn't matter. It's not going to work."

That snapped her back to here, now, and an ugly ripple of dread sank through her. Undermining her again, always.

"So you just want me to give up? Just because we're dealing with something that _no one else_ has ever studied this extensively?" She curbed her anger just barely, holding it hard right behind her teeth, and yet — "I knew you were disloyal, but I never took you for a quitter."

Not hard enough. A low, cold blaze made its way into the muscles of Sasuke's face. For a moment, she thought she could see the tomoe spinning in both eyes like a purl in some mutable thing, a stirring underneath.

She should have kept her mouth shut. She shouldn't have come here.

"My loyalty isn't the issue," he muttered, slow and cutting. There was an intention in his eyes, those small waves in the black, and it was not kind. He was fundamentally incapable of kindness.

"Oh, really? Enlighten me, then."

"It's yours."

Her stomach lurched. " _What?"_

Sasuke's thin mouth was set, jaw tight. "Your insistence on blind patriotism is why we are stuck here. We have always been stuck here, turning and functioning solely on some idiotic persistence. You, Naruto, Tsunade, _Kakashi —_ none of you are willing to look past your fucking selfish, cancerous, _Konoha-centric_ idealism and just —"

"Shut up," she barked. Wrong. He was wrong, and so stupid. "You have no idea what Naruto and I went through to keep you alive after everything you did. And yes," she pressed on, " _yes,_ you have suffered loss. I know you have. But Konoha has been nothing short of forgiving to you. So for you to —"

"Forgiving?" His lip snarled as he exhaled sharply as a slap, that one nasty noise Sakura couldn't stand for the very life of her. "You call this forgiving, then? This disgusting, pathetic definition of living? Fooling me into the lie of a temporary sentence?"

His shoulders were wide, still, his anger pure and clean. There was no color to his face, no flush of hate like she surely wore. She resisted the urge to hit him. She wanted to put a roaring punch to that callous face, put blood rushing where her hand had been, strong enough to make him flinch and wail.

It'd been a while, a long, long while since she'd last had an argument with him. And it was all adrenaline, fear and loathing and resentment, and she'd forgotten how potent it truly was. A flash of a vision crossed her mind — her sternum collapsing from the instant force of his shoulder, the impact splintering and bursting her heart. The false memory of him throwing lightning into her chest and shredding all the muscle, filling the valves and ventricles with insensate light. It all thumped wild and hot behind her ribs.

"What the hell are you talking about?" She did take a portion of a step toward him despite herself, even though she had to look up at him now. "Nobody _fooled_ you into anything, Sasuke. It's a sentence you earned, and they're letting you off early. What else do you want? What the hell else _could_ you want?"

Sasuke said nothing. He only looked at her. Black hair, white face, hard and mystic eyes. Beautiful and cruel.

"Are you always just going to" — _words,_ they were starting to fail her — "to bite the hand that feeds you?"

Nothing. Again. Her pulse pumped to fill the quiet, curling in her ears. The judgment in his face was immaculately clear.

"This is what I meant. Blind loyalty." He stared down at her, looking at her like the words had to be pressed through the lenses of his mismatched eyes in order to be heard. "Did you think they were ever really going to give me my power back? Did you think they were doing more than parading you around for their own entertainment, making you believe you were accomplishing something significant?"

Wrong. Stupid. "You —"

"Did you really think they don't already know everything about the rinnegan? That all this pain they put you through isn't only for show?" He was immovable, crackling with latent fury. A chidori building in silence and absence. "Your beloved _Hokage-sama_ and her council are playing you. Using your weakness and your all-consuming need for validation like a toy. All for their own greed."

Emotion ripped through her, a tear in the seam of the Earth, a blow through the chest. Greed. He wanted to talk about _greed._

It was not wrong to believe that he knew. He knew what he'd done to her, the life he'd left her with. He knew that she always laid herself plain before him, ready for whatever may come, wanting to help the smallest parts of him that he'd allow her to. But he never allowed her anything save for the thinnest slip of hope, elusive, sliding through her fingers, wet and oily as an eel. Sasuke took, took, never gave. He came, he saw, and he always left, burning fields and forests in his wake.

"How dare you," she whispered, splintered, clutching the fabric of her shirt. Any shade of grounding, of landing back on her feet. "I know you don't believe in me, but this is…"

The right words failed her again, too lost where she couldn't reach. Her teeth gnawed at the inside of her lip.

"What I believe in are facts," he told her, stepping as if to circle her. "It is a fact that Konoha made the conscious decision to kill my clan."

Her fist clenched harder at her stomach. He looked straight ahead, away from her.

"It is a fact that I never asked for your help. Not when we were children, not when we were enemies, and not now."

Her palm laid flat now, fingers bending at their last joints to grip at her skin through her clothing. Protecting her, maybe, or trying to tear out her insides — she wasn't sure which one would feel more right, and she knew the feeling of both all too well.

"That is not even close to true." _Do not fucking cry, Sakura,_ she thought, but the tears were already a lump wedged in her throat. "I —"

"Offered," he finished, unbothered. "You've never understood the difference."

"Oh, well, excuse me for _giving a shit_ about you."

"Don't victimize yourself for something you weren't asked to do. Your emotions have always gotten the better of you." His eyes flitted down to the press of her hand, seeming to stare through it, like he was searching for the marks her fingernails were undoubtedly creating beneath. "I acknowledge that your powers have grown immensely since we were genin. That does not mean that you are capable of successfully reversing my condition."

"It's because you won't —"

"You need to listen to me." He was looking into her again, dark iron eyes blazing still, but different, somehow. More intense. His stature was dwarfing her. "When I told you not to follow me out of the village, you didn't listen. When I told you to stop trying to bring me back here, you didn't listen. When I told you I did not love you, you didn't listen."

The way he said _love._ It was without inflection or feeling. She wished she was used to it by now, wished she could purge that need to fill that gaping void in him. "Those were completely different situations, Sasuke, and you know it."

"Listen to me now." It was like her hadn't heard her at all. "It doesn't matter what you think. It doesn't matter what you try. There is nothing you can do to fix this."

Her head shook automatically. Deny, deny, deny. _No._ He was lying to her. He had to be, because he always lied. There was something he was hiding, protecting behind that stony facade. She felt hot, and stuck, and awful. He was wrong.

" _You_ listen to _me,"_ she tried again, willing the shake from her voice. "If you don't want to tell me what you know, that's fine. You don't trust me, or the village, fine. Okay. But I'm the one in control of whether you get your chakra access back or not. So if you don't have even a _molecule_ of faith in my abilities" — _don't cry_ — "which I have worked harder than you _ever_ have to achieve" — _do not cry_ — "then you're not going to get very far."

"You don't get it, do you," he said, his words almost languid with the way they dragged and cut, glassy. "You're the same as you used to be. Pathetically one-track minded. Inserting yourself where you do not belong. You can't fix it, Sakura."

"Yes," she pushed, convincing herself all over again. "I —"

"You _CANNOT. FIX IT."_

It was like lightning had struck, hot and white. A deafening silence. Crows darted from the trees, soundless, black streaks against the pale sky, disappearing into thin air.

Sakura felt like she'd been electrocuted, suddenly alert to every single thing, living and dead. The fine hairs on her skin were standing up and still, the follicles and nerves burning within the surface. Every empty home seemed to radiate with the dissonance of Sasuke's words, the hairline fracture in his voice. She saw him for what felt like the first time.

His face was not a mask anymore. No, it was wild, and furious, and fractured. Something was seeping through, and it was sinister — and suddenly she was back in their operation room, light filling every sense, an ancient, vile condescension leaching into every last part of her.

This was more than a lack of faith. It was a multitude of bad things. Anger, leaking out from him like the evil hiding in his rinnegan. Pain — physical or mental, she couldn't tell, not from that single crack between his heavy, dark brows. More than anything, though, she saw that miniscule curl of his lip, that blue heat in his eyes, her reflection in that one remaining human eye, as he turned his gaze away. Disgust. It was, of all the things he could feel for her, for this entire process, _disgust._

In that moment, Sakura felt it. She felt his repulsing hatred. She felt his inglorious pride. She felt the eyes of a thousand dead Uchihas on her, condemning her to his truth.

 _Defective,_ she remembered him saying with crystal clarity, his back to her, silhouetted by the light outside of that dreary room in his stolen home. _I should have known._

Her fist collided with his face in a thunderclap. And the floodgates broke.

It felt like her mind and her body were operating outside of each other, some feral instinct unleashing itself from the darkest places she carried. She screamed, she hit and thrashed and let her fingers tear at anything they could. She had a deep, base need to feel flesh, _his_ flesh split and drag beneath her nails, to put red in his skin and keep it flowing, enough to drink. The sides of her fists pounded against hard planes of muscle and bone. Her fingers found nothing for purchase. She swung and batted, struggling against the tall slab of his frame, and she screamed.

"Sakura," Sasuke commanded, voice muted. She collided with him even harder. Why wouldn't he _move?_

" _Shut up!"_ She shrieked, unintelligible, throat blistering, aiming blindly with her fists until he caught her wrists in one hand. Her body jerked uselessly. "Let me _GO!"_

"Stop." He sidestepped a kick she attempted to land on his knee. "This is a waste of time for the both of us."

"Don't even fucking _talk to me_ about _wasting time,_ you piece of _shit,"_ Sakura all but growled. His hold was unyielding, too strong and calm for her to rip herself out of. It was truly stunning, his strength, and all it did was make her exceptionally aware of her own inadequacy, kerosene to the burning hatred eating her insides. "I've wasted my entire fucking _life_ on you, Sasuke. You've been nothing but a thorn in everyone's side since the day we met you. An inconvenience. A _coward._ "

His eyes still held that same expression, refusing to budge, even with a bruise blooming beneath the skin of his jaw. She couldn't stop.

"You're the worst fucking person I've ever known, you know that? I guarantee you everyone you've ever met feels the same way. Even Naruto." Her fingers twitched toward him, lusting for blood. "I wish I'd never met you, sometimes. I wish you'd never existed."

Sasuke's face didn't change, still. It was like he'd been frozen in time, in the grayness and emptiness of this cursed place. "You don't mean that."

The depth in his tone was his own version of suredness, she could tell. And she felt that fury rage even further within herself, all-consuming now that she was giving it the space to be.

"Oh," she whispered, voice raw, "I do. I absolutely do. And you know what?" She wrenched her arms, forcing her elbows toward her stomach once, twice, until he finally let her wrists out of his grasp. "It doesn't matter whether or not you think I can help you. It doesn't matter what I can or can't do. Because" — she swallowed down an inflamed sob — "because I will _never_ do _anything_ to give you what you want. I will never give you a single fucking thing again."

She should have waited to see if the words permeated. She should have waited to see if he gave even the barest inkling of hurt away, if he cared at all. But she didn't. Sakura had done enough waiting for him. It was time to let go. Not give up — never give up. No — it was time to let it go, once and for all. She steeled herself, letting her tongue work before she could even think to withhold anything.

"As long as I live," she said — "As long as I'm alive to see it, you will never have what you think you deserve. I'll make sure of it myself."

She took one final look at his face, that cruel and beautiful thing, vowing to never feel for it again. The wild, unrelenting hate. That deep ripple of untapped power and something visceral, an abraded emotion in him that could only be that same old familiar disgust. From now on, she would only offer him the same.

Sasuke did not reply to her. He only stared, solid as stone, jaw set and determined to stay that way. She could never expect more from him. She wouldn't.

Sakura turned to go without another word, leaving him where he stood, severing it clean.

She immediately broke into a sprint, letting the buildings and alleys of the compound blur past as she ran, too fast to reach for her with cold tendrils of tempting, malevolent wind or whispers or spirits. Too quickly for pity or time to change her mind or let her anger dissolve into heartache. Her feet thumped against the hard packed roads, _thump-thump-thump_ until the paths were more worn, populated, recognizably so even when empty, and the brick walls surrounding the Uchiha grounds were out of sight behind her. She had barely noticed running through the entrance — but now that she knew where she was, away from it, she could breathe, gasp painfully around the open wounds within her chest and stomach.

Winded, she leaned against a tree, bracing herself against it with an arm. Stupid. _Stupid._ Her body crumpled against the trunk, feeling its bark scrape her pulsing skin. Her hair caught in the grooves of it, tangling and snatching as she sank toward the thick, mossy roots, unable to keep herself composed any longer. It'd been stupid to see him when she was so thoroughly weakened by the unsuccess of the procedure. It'd been stupid to go alone. It'd been stupid, childishly so, to think he would meet her in the middle, knowing he never had before. Not on anything, and especially not on what mattered the most.

Her huge, labored breaths stuttered, and she choked on her inhales. The tears came. She couldn't have stopped them if she wanted to, falling from her closed eyes as they were in salted streaks that made her cheeks burn. She cried like she'd wanted to all along. She sobbed — mournfully, exhaustedly, frustration in every fiber of her being. Sadness, most of all.

She'd done it. The words she'd kept locked inside had found a way out, seized the first slight and slip in her composure, learned and hardened through years of suffocating it into submission just to keep the pain manageable, livable. They'd exorcised themselves of their own free will, and it was fully justifiable. Sasuke might have been wrong, but she hadn't been. That didn't make it any better or easier.

The worst part, she thought, weeping miserably against that old Konoha tree, was not that she had said what she'd said. It wasn't that she'd been cruel, like him. It wasn't even that she'd exposed things she was never fully intending to let see the light of day.

No. The worst part, she knew, was that despite it all, despite how right it was to hate and fight and deny Sasuke of what he wanted most, she was sorry.

Sakura cried, let herself cry until her eyes were parched, until her nose and lips were sticky-dry, until the tepid daylight had faded fully into evening. And then she started home, walking only for that half-empty bottle at her bedside.


	5. Chapter 5

**a/n:** hi everyone,

thank you so much for your patience and your kind comments. it's been a loaded year but We Are Surviving And Trying To Keep Thriving.

this is the conclusion of this prequel fic. please subscribe to me so you can read the main fic of this series, 'circumstance', once it gets posted. thank you for all your support! this fic means a lot to me and I hope you all enjoy what's coming - maybe not here, but definitely later on. :)

again, as with last chapter, I would like to say -

***content warning in this chapter for gore/death/suicide content. if u are having mental health problems, approach with caution. xo

* * *

.

.

.

 _travel through the night_

 _because there is no fear_

 _alone, but right behind_

 _until I watch you disappear_

.

.

.

 _Get up._

That low, ancient rumble resonated in the walls of his mind, gruff and blunt.

 _Get up, kid,_ it said again, intangibly poking him into alertness, some probe he could always somehow physically feel. _Time to get moving._

Naruto groaned, grumbled, winced into the sunlight that laid warm on his face. It was yellow as a buttercup, noonish, and happily settling into his pores. He wanted to tuck in like a cat, curl up beneath it and nap until it faded into evening.

His eyes flung open. Noonish.

"Shit." He sat up, fog dissolving quickly in his brain. "Kurama! What the hell, dude?"

 _I'm not your alarm clock, you idiot!_ the beast barked. _Be grateful I woke you up at all!_

A groan left Naruto loud and clear, and he buried his face in his hands, smelling the damp grass and earth on his palms. He'd just been kicking it out in Field Four of the training grounds, doing airborne somersaults to expend some of the extra energy he'd had during the earlier hours of patrol this morning. He wasn't supposed to have fallen asleep. He _never_ fell asleep on the job — not since his days as an elementary school student, and back then he was doing it on purpose, trying to prove a point.

Yamato was going to murder him.

 _Sai_ was going to murder him.

Naruto sighed, shoving both hands into his hair.

It wasn't like he never goofed off during patrols. Sometimes, he would sneak into Ichiraku from the back, pawning fried noodles and onions off of the jolly, generous Teuchi, or he'd get a spoon or slap on the wrist from his fussy daughter. Sometimes, he would tiptoe on the roof of the school building, dropping notes and found objects to Shino while he studiously learned at the elbow of Iruka — neither of whom were amused by the gifts, making them all the more necessary to give. Sometimes, he would visit Sakura at the hospital and make sure she was adequately caffeinated, just because he was a good friend. Never, though, did he sleep.

Maybe other people did, but he wouldn't know, honestly. Patrols were the most unbelievably boring ten hours in the universe because everyone had to live in the shadows. It would be different if he didn't have to keep himself a secret. That was really the thing about ANBU he still wasn't keen on — all the waiting, the hiding, the surreptitious nature of every single thing. He knew by now that being unnoticeable was not his strong suit.

Whatever. He stood up, feeling the slight muddy wetness on his back and legs from laying in the morning dew too long, but the coolness of it was kind of nice. A great yawn seized him, and he blew out the exhale from his gut, a mangled growl of a yell carrying off with it. Awake. Up. Time to go.

"Kurama," he called to himself, stretching his arms to looseness with a grin.

 _What,_ was the response from within, neither a question nor an attempt to play along. Naruto felt his smile grow wider.

"Let's go have a little fun."

Kurama's smirk ran deep, spreading through his body in a ripple of warmth and energy. A swell of chakra, the lighting of a red-golden fuse. The most natural, familiar feeling in the world.

 _Sure,_ Kurama replied. _Let's do it, kid._ But Naruto was already a few steps ahead of him, bounding off, unable to be contained to a moment, even with his mask pressed to the hot skin of his face.

.

.

Another hour or two found him in his usual haunts, seeing how his other friends lived. Shikamaru was napping, home from a mission; Chouji was doing taijutsu drills with his cousins, and Ino was yawning behind the flower shop counter, staring out the propped-open door with tangible wistfulness. Kiba, Lee, and Tenten were off on a mission, as were most of the other chuunin and jounin. Neji had the day off and was using his time to go to clan meetings with Hinata, but Naruto avoided him like the plague. He'd be the first person to rat him out if he caught him not doing exactly what he was supposed to do — he could almost _see_ the stick up Neji's ass lodged beneath his tonsils if he looked hard enough.

He wasn't sure where Sakura was, though. He knew she wasn't at work lately. That the unsealing hadn't gone well. He'd stopped by her house the day before, but she hadn't been there, and without her chakra its using blaring green flare resting constantly in his awareness, reliable and clear when he could even faintly sense it, she was hard to find. She was like — like Sasuke now.

Naruto tamped down the feeling that welled up inside him at the thought of that name, that person. A single finger, pale white, slipping beneath a slight opening in the wraps of his bandages — a ghost of a touch, curious, against skin not his own, but felt suddenly like he owned it more than the rest of his natural body — he swallowed the memory down, hard, feeling the obstruction rise in his throat around the action.

"Eugh," he shuddered aloud, shaking his head with a whip of his neck. Shizune turned to look down at him from her desk chair, an eyebrow raised.

"I told you you wouldn't like them, and yet you insisted." A manicured finger poked at the bag he held, nail crumpling the aluminum as it landed on the nutrition label. "They're diet. _Di-et._ It's basically just eating solidified air to feel full."

"Then why the hell do you eat them?" His voice was muffled by the wallpaper paste in his mouth. "They don't even taste like cheese. It's just _sad."_

"Yeah, well. Pregnancy ruined my body." Shizune sniffed, pulling another pen from a chipped mug on her desk. "It's all about the power of belief, Naruto. When you're a forty-year-old woman with no hormone regulation, you'll understand."

"Hm." He slid his body further down the wall, legs long against the floor and cheese puffs forgone.

Forty years old, huh? It was a wonder of a thing. He never used to entertain the idea of getting older than a young adult, just because he wasn't sure if he'd make it that far, parentless and isolated and carrying a demon as he was. Even when he'd made friends, his happiness was so much about the present, and his goal was always right outside of reach, close enough to taste. And then Jiraiya had died, and Tsunade had fought until her true age showed for a long moment, and suddenly it was all he could think about.

He'd pictured himself in this office, leading things, shoving paperwork off his desk in cumbersome heaps and forgetting about it. He'd even pictured the divots in the wood that his heels would make whenever he sat with his feet crossed on the surface, leaning back in his chair to contemplate things. He'd thought about what the village would look like from outside those big windows, how his silhouette would change and broaden over the years he served and stood before it. Hokage, forever. It was all he wanted.

He'd thought about Gaara, wrinkles at the corner of his eyes and lips when he smiled, deepening into a meeting they'd have twenty-five years from now. He'd thought about Shikamaru, all the daughters he'd have that would nag him ceaselessly; whether he'd look like a mirror of his dad, only less badass. He'd thought about Kakashi, old as hell, retired and not looking much different than now, walking around town with his dogs and a newspaper tucked under his arm and a passive wave to familiar faces. He'd thought about his friends and their clans, what their roles would be with families and children and duties and so much to protect and defend.

He'd thought about Sakura, embodying her mentor more the older she got, only kinder and softer and prettier than Tsunade's sharp edges, running the hospital, working harder than anyone else would or could. He'd thought about Sasuke as the adult he'd always been, shoulders straight and broad, stately, and having him whole and normal again with the return of his abilities. Sleek. Powerful. His right hand man. His partner in crime, or the better things that would come with responsibility. A council member — not rewriting the past, but helping Konoha grow from where it was planted.

The three of them together, creating history.

A clanging slam shook the sunny air of the room, whipping the calm from it the same way the door whipped open and hit the wall.

"If _one more person_ tries to tell me how to do my job," Tsunade grumbled, not happy. Her heels clicked against the floor. Naruto could feel the steps where he lay, like heartbeats tapping on the back of his head. "I'm too old for this shit, Shizune, I'm telling you right now."

"That's why you should let me do it," he replied cheerfully, and Tsunade started, noticed him splayed out, a giant among mountains of obsolete paperwork. A signature frown touched the corner of her lips.

"The hell are you doing here?" Shizune was used to this by now, clearly, and paid no attention to the Hokage coming over to kick her esteemed ANBU agent and favorite jounin in the leg. Naruto yelped. "Why aren't you on duty?"

"This is duty!" He rolled away from Tsunade's ruthless foot and hopped up, springing into standing. "I'm protecting the Hokage!"

She looked him up and down with a grimace, a spark in her eyes, and then she stalked toward him suddenly. Naruto stumbled back, unwilling to get a smack on the ass that would bruise, again. She cackled at whatever face he made.

"Come here, you shit. I'm not going to hit you."

"Yeah, right. I'm not fallin' for that one again." His fingers crossed into that familiar sign. "Kage bunshin no —" his back hit the wall — "ah! _Ahh!_ Shizune! _Shizune"_ — Tsunade closed in on him — _"AHH! SHIZUNE! HELP!"_

All that could be heard were muted crunching noises. "Sorry," Shizune murmured, writing on something. "Busy."

"Damnit, Naruto." A firm brush of a hand to his shoulder. "Stay _still,_ damnit! There's grass all over you!"

"Oh. I forgot about that." Every muscle in him mostly relaxed, letting her turn him and swipe drying straws off his uniform.

"Of course you did," she muttered. "Tracking it all over my damn office."

It was quiet again for a minute. Shizune was snacking on the remainder of her despicable excuse for food, finishing up signing some documents; Tsunade was fussing all over him, picking blades of grass out of his hair and shirt and grumbling the whole while. Something about it all tugged deep within his stomach — nostalgia, maybe, or deja vu. Comfortable.

Tsunade pulled at his shoulder and turned him to face her. He blinked down at her, feeling young and kiddish. Her nails were a light scratch at his eyebrow. Green fluttered like confetti to the floor, slow, floating in the sunlight paneled toward their feet, like it was chasing the last it knew it would get.

"You look awful," she said, thumb pressing beneath his eye. He started. "Have you been subsisting entirely off of salt? Are you even sleeping?"

In any other case, he'd brush it off with a _yes, baa-chan,_ an annoyed huff or a raspberry tongue. But he'd seen the dark circles there after showering this morning — an open book, no secret to hide. And more than that, he could see the sallowness in her own skin, the frayed hair around her temples, the way her jutsu was crumbling at the very edges. She looked haggard. Worried. So was he.

"Are _you_ sleeping?" He resisted making a joke about her drinking habits. She'd probably slap him or something. He could see the empty bottles rolled uncaringly beneath her desk chair. The piles of scrolls lying languid on the floor from where they'd clearly been thrown against the wall.

"No," Tsunade murmured, and her eyes slipped away. The palpable weight of her gaze slid off of him in an instant. _Exactly,_ he thought, trying not to recall Sasuke's slack, unconscious face and gray pallor, blood dried in the corners of his lips. How much he wanted — they _both_ wanted, him and Sasuke — to feel that pulse of chakra beneath his skin again, quicksilver.

"How did the meeting go?" Shizune asked with some gentleness. With a final pat to his shoulder, Tsunade turned away, stomping halfheartedly toward her desk. A huge sigh left her, slouching her shoulders like the grandma she was.

"Honestly, it was a nightmare." Red fingernails scanned the scrolls all atop her desk. "I'm worried…"She seemed to hazard a glance back at Naruto. "If we don't get a handle on our — situation, everything up north will spiral out of control before we even get the chance to do something real."

His stomach twisted. "I thought ANBU was making progress with the de — de…"

"Demilitarization efforts? Sure we are. A number of high-ranking officials were assassinated thanks to us," she said more clearly. "But the ninja there are unbelievably powerful. Don't you remember Kakashi's probe team?"

He felt himself blink. "Kakashi-sensei?"

Tsunade stopped shuffling papers long enough to raise an eyebrow at him. Even Shizune looked up from her work.

"Yes, you dolt. His whole team was killed."

The hard line of her mouth, the weird look on Shizune's face. Something he was missing —

Oh.

 _Oh._

Naruto had never been involved in gossip. Mostly because nobody ever told him anything. But even he remembered the whispers, the shock of grief and terror that ran through the ANBU offices and locker rooms those several months ago. _Dead, no bodies._ A team of their most skilled, most convert ninja, all brutally murdered after doing their jobs. The high possibility of death was a prerequisite of the job, and he knew that risk, but this had been different.

 _Do you think he did it himself? Went back to his old ways?_ Naruto remembered someone whispering while he changed. _Nah,_ a closer friend in the corps had replied. _No way. He's too loyal now. Soft._

Kakashi. They'd been talking about Kakashi. The man who rolled out of bed and performed massive fuinjutsu procedures in the same clothes he slept in. The man who poked him directly up the ass the very first time they met. The man who played jokes and read porn and loved dogs and ate with a mask on and smiled with his eyes. The man who, somehow, was one of the strongest, coolest, most formidable ninja he'd ever witnessed.

He wouldn't have had the chance to know. He never saw Kakashi-sensei anymore. Suddenly, he couldn't even recall the last time they'd hung out. The man was too busy to even grab a bite to eat with him on either of their birthdays. And Naruto realized, with a sinking feeling, that he wasn't even sure when Kakashi's birthday _was._ They were close, and his sensei was one of his favorite people — but clearly they weren't close enough. Was it because of this? How had he not known? He'd have to fix that.

"Yamato said their recent attempts were more successful," Shizune said. "It's in part because of the lack of genjutsu used by the ninja infiltrating. And the refugee camps near the border have been immensely helpful for gathering intel."

"It's not enough, though." Tsunade sat down at her desk. The chair rolled and creaked beneath her dead weight, but a ghost of a smirk reappeared on her face. "Your husband's a smart man, and I'm glad I put him in charge. My concern, though, isn't offense. It's defense. And I'm not ready to see a third war in my lifetime."

"Yeah," Shizune said grimly, expression as cold and awful as Naruto felt hearing those words. "Me neither."

War. The word bounced against the walls behind his eyes. Like some kind of pinball game, it started at the top, then rolled toward the start, hitting every surface it could on the way back down. _Plink._ Gaara, dead and hollow before they'd managed to get him back. _Plink._ Chiyo-baa in Sakura's arms. _Plink._ The Akatsuki, swift as wind and dark as evil.

 _Plink._ Pein.

 _Plink._ Jiraiya.

 _Plink._ The other jinchuuriki.

 _Plink._ Obito, Itachi, Madara. Gai, forever debilitated.

 _Plink._ Kaguya. The dead rising. Dark and light.

 _Plink._ Him and Sasuke, the force of their hands, the sun and the moon.

 _Plink, plink, plink._

A shift happened somewhere, a physical click in his brain, and every muscle locked in place. The thought rose and grabbed a hold of him, unshakably sure.

It all made sense. Everything made sense.

They weren't just letting Sasuke off the hook. This whole thing, this play at bringing him back, wasn't being done for togetherness, forgiveness, love.

They were priming him for combat.

"Baa-chan," Naruto rasped, not even meaning to, not even realizing he'd said it until the surprise changed Tsunade's face. "Baa-chan, you can't."

"Can't what?" Her forehead creased between her brows. She had the audacity to pretend.

"You can't do this to him! I thought you were — that this was — that you —"

 _"What,_ Naruto?" Now she was getting angry. Of course.

"Sasuke doesn't" — his fists clenched — "you can't just — _punish_ him, and then take it away when it's time to fight your battles!" Tears brewed hot behind his eyes. "I can't believe you, baa-chan. I _trusted_ you.I thought you would take care of him 'cause you wanted to, not treat him like a — like a —" _Pawn. A movable piece. Another nameless soldier._

"Naruto, that's not —"

"Shizune," Tsunade interrupted, a hand up to stop her. Shizune shut her mouth, apparently unsatisfied, and crouched back toward her seat. The room felt thick.

Tsunade cut the tension with her eyes, looking directly into his. A hard stare, locked in fire.

"Naruto," she said, like it was a warning. The problem was that he faced red flags like a charging bull.

"You better tell me the truth, Tsunade baa-chan, right now —"

"You have no _idea_ what went into this decision. Don't start throwing around accusations as if you do."

His own anger had gone cold at first, the realization of what had been hidden from him a sickening suck and chill, like he'd accidentally stepped off the side of a cliff. But now, seeing her vehement refusal to own up to it already building a wall between them, he felt the anger mounting swiftly, a fiery hole in the ground rising to meet him. He felt Kurama shift in that deep yellow blackness within, waking again. Hungry for it.

"Oh, yeah? Don't I, though?" He felt impotent, fucking _angry_ , a fresh scrape clean through layers of skin. He marched up to her desk like the earth itself was taking him there. "There's no way this is just a coincidence. War might happen, and suddenly you're being nice to him?"

"Don't question me!" She shot out of her seat, palms slapped flat on her desk, glaring up at him furiously. Her eyes were so brown they were almost red. "You need to trust me. I'm a lot of things, but I'm not cruel. And —"

"Making him fight in a _war_ right after he's done with a sentence, with no time to just _enjoy_ his _life,_ seems pretty fuckin' cruel to me!"

"That's what the council wanted," she said, grimacing almost as deep as he could feel himself frowning. "Believe it or not, I didn't want this. Not like this, anyway."

"Then _why?!_ You're the Hokage! You can do whatever you want! You're supposed to make the best decision, everyone else be damned!" He wanted to shake her, make the old lady come out instead of some weirdly young lady with pigtails, a wrinkle only between her furrowed, irate brows instead of the million she deserved. If she wasn't going to use her powers for good, then why pretend?

A snarl, half-bitten, left her mouth. He felt it stoke the fire.

"This is why you're still a child," she told him. "You don't understand how this job works. I have to put the needs of the country above my own prejudices or wants. If you ever make it to this position, you'll have to do the same goddamn thing. And I don't know if I can trust you to do that given this shitty little hissy fit you're throwing over some stupid fucking boy."

 _Hissy fit?_ Kurama laughed from within, a scoff scratching at Naruto's insides. _You can do better than that._

 _Yeah,_ Naruto replied, stuck on her lack of guarantee, her lack of faith, her dismissal of his best friend. _If she wants one, I'll give it to her._

He unstrapped his mask from where he'd tied it around the back of one arm. He didn't even glance at its shape, toad-like and ancient, before he threw it to the ground with force, letting the ceramic shatter, the metal inside expose itself like an organ. He sent a spark of chakra through his leg and stepped, crumpling the metal easily, tissue paper under his casual duress.

"I'm done, then," he said, heat in his throat. "I don't want to do this stupid, shitty job anymore. I don't know _why_ I'm even doing this. You're just gonna keep being Hokage until both of us die anyway."

"You don't belong in ANBU, Naruto." He looked back at her face, so seemingly unaffected by his outburst. "It's just a formality. You belong with your team. That's why I let this whole thing with Sasuke happen."

The hurt flared, gut-wrenching. Those old feelings, so long buried — that doubt that he wasn't wanted, wasn't good enough to belong — began to surface. He felt them all bubbling up, air pockets from the bottom of the dank water of his consciousness that Kurama always sat in.

"Bull _shit,_ baa-chan." He couldn't stop his lower lip from trembling. "You never cared about Sasuke. Not ever. And I'm starting to think you never gave a shit about me either."

She was mad at him, but now even more so. He could see the way it contorted her face, warped it with ire. She always hated when he didn't go along with her.

"How _dare you,"_ she growled, voice rising to a full-out yell. He could see her teeth behind her lips now, bared to strike. "Do you even realize how unbelievably fucking _stupid_ you sound right now? After everything I've done for you, this is the last goddamn _fucking —"_

 _"ENOUGH!"_

Shizune's voice yanked them both from the moment, like she'd grabbed fighting dogs by the scruff. They both turned to find her standing at her own desk, arms crossed, face dark.

"Shizune, stay the hell out of this," Tsunade said, her voice loud.

Naruto needed to have the last word. "I'm not just gonna —"

"Shut up!" Shizune returned. He hadn't seen her that pissed in a very long time. "I'm not going to sit here and let the two of you treat each other like this. You're being _ridiculous._ Acting like _children!"_

His gut twisted. Children. To everyone else, he was always acting like a child.

"Fine, then. I'm out," he said into the tense silence of the room. And he meant it. "I'm done."

"The hell you are," Tsunade said, reaching to grab his arm as he turned to go. He gave it a violent shake, shoving it away from himself until the contact was lost.

He managed one last glance at her. She was right: she was a lot of things. Mad. Mean. Someone who knew better. He stared right at the tension in her hands, the downward curve of her lying mouth, the fire in her eyes.

"I'm not a fuckin' kid," he told her, "so stop treating me like one."

He left after that, running through the window he entered from, and he didn't hear either woman say a word while he did.

.

.

He ran, and ran, and ran. He couldn't sit still. He wasn't even hungry. He had no idea how to distract himself from the hot whirlwind of post-argument. Any time he fought with Tsunade, he'd just go work it off and kick some training dummies or wrestle Lee, then they'd see each other and she would say sorry and muss his hair and it'd be fine. But this was different.

Naruto couldn't just — he couldn't let _anyone_ treat Sasuke like that. He'd had to do this a few times over the years since Sasuke came back to the village. Some black eyes had been doled out for words like _traitor_ or _coward_ being thrown around; some friendships had dissolved with people who insisted on hating the Uchiha clan, still. Anyone that close-minded wasn't worth Naruto's time. It was incredible to him that anyone still lived like that — prejudiced, and persistently so. Hate was the most soul-sucking, unnecessary emotion. They were adults now. This was an era of peace. They could work things out.

Besides, Sasuke had done nothing but good since he returned to Konoha. He was dutifully living out the sentence he was given, paying off any debt he had to the village, keeping to himself. Naruto knew it killed him not to have his powers, but he never complained about it. They still trained together — taijutsu only, of course — to keep him ready for the chakra he would soon get back. There was a lot to look forward to. Things were good.

He plopped down on a rooftop, thinking, the shingles warm against his legs. Were things good, though? Tsunade and Shizune were talking about war like it was actually a possibility. He knew shit was getting serious with ANBU, but only serious in the sense of...of something temporary. Something they could fix. Sai had told him, dark eyes unfailingly neutral, not to worry about it. So he hadn't. Now, though...the candid way Tsunade had mentioned it, the timing of this whole thing with Sasuke falling into place — now, he couldn't be so sure.

His hand found the mess of hair at the back of his head and tugged, subconsciously, and he felt a little like he might jump out of his skin.

He'd be back with his team. Tsunade had said so. Him, Sasuke, Sakura-chan, Kakashi-sensei, all back in one piece after years of being apart. He tried to picture it in his head: Sakura, hair pink and long and face as pretty as ever, sparkling with strength and focus as she read medical stuff or trained. He knew that. Kakashi, face in a pervy book, twirling a kunai around his finger while he lounged in a tree to "keep watch." He could see that. Sasuke, grumpy but competitive in his understated way, using his katon to make a fire and aiming shuriken at trees — Sasuke, there. He wanted that.

Naruto felt the warmth of that ideal, that image, a print like an impression in wet sand. But it was just as impermanent, swallowed beneath the coax and cover of the sea. There was something hollow about it. Something about it just didn't work. Maybe it was because they were older now? Kakashi-sensei looked the same, just with two eyes visible instead of one. Sakura, though...Sasuke...his stomach felt unsettled still, flopping weirdly, and nothing real came to mind. He could picture them all individually, a still life, parts of a whole. Not as one big picture.

Maybe it was because he was different now, too. He was strong, and a sage, and had more friends than he knew how to keep up with. He was lucky and full, so far removed from the lonely, angry kid he'd been when he met them. Maybe it was because they were all different, in a way.

He laid back, arms spread to let the sun touch every inch of skin it could, head against the sandpaper roughness of the roof. The three of them weren't the same people anymore. He was imagining them without their complexity, without the years that had passed since they started. And that was just counting the stuff he knew, that he'd been there for. What else had Kakashi-sensei hidden from him — a whole _team dying?_ There was no telling. Was Sakura-chan hiding things from him too, then? Would she do that to him? He couldn't tell if he could even be sure of that.

The one thing really bothering him was that Tsunade had said he belonged with them. It begged the question: if he didn't know the simplest things about its members, then did he really?

He felt himself retreating inward, the anger curling back into its hiding spot, not meaning to at all. Dampened, inundated by confusion. All nine tails between his legs, shame taking their place. He scrubbed his palms over his face, relishing in the hot skin and calluses rough against his face, and slapped his cheeks just to feel the sting. And then it was quiet.

 _You miss 'em,_ Kurama said plainly, a soft reverberation cutting through the mass. _Simple as that._

"I dunno, though," Naruto whispered, as if this were classified information. "I always miss them. I don't know what that means anymore, you know?"

Of course, though, he didn't. Kurama never responded to those kinds of questions. Fucker.

Air left Naruto's lungs in a long, slow drop, and then he filled them up again. One breath by one breath.

 _Want us to find him?_ Kurama finally responded instead. Naruto could feel the ribbing on the edge of the question — he groaned against it.

"Stop eavesdropping on my brain, asshole," he said, louder now. "I'm not in the mood for sparring."

 _So you do, then?_

Naruto groaned again, trying to drown out the ancient cackle within. _"Stop_ , dude, I'm — I'm working. I can't —"

Kurama laughed so hard it sparked a drove of goosebumps on his back and arms. _Work. Sure._

 _I hate you,_ Naruto thought, hoping the message would drip down into the void. Apparently, it missed — no response. He shook his arms out instead, wiggling the discomfort out through his fingers, and closed his eyes. Breathed in. Breathed out. One breath by one breath.

A weight, sleepy in the lightest way, settled over him. Habit. Sage energy was always there, but it wouldn't truly manifest unless he leaned into it, took a step —

 _He's by the memorial._

"Damnit, Kurama!" His face grew hot, the sun baking it. "I'm not going over there!"

But even when he stood up, even when he continued his shift on rooftops and the back streets of neighborhoods, even when he tried to eat and forget the curdle of inertia still floating in his stomach, he could still feel that presence burning a hole into the back of his consciousness. And he did, somehow, go over there, drawn to that slip of unmistakable energy like a magnet throughout the rest of his patrols. He spiraled through the village in a circle, wading through thickening clouds and drifting sunbeams, waiting. Avoiding.

He couldn't explain what the pull was. He couldn't explain what the hesitation was. He didn't even know how much time had passed since he'd decided not to come this way. All he knew was that when he crouched atop the branch that overlooked the edge of the memorial grounds, when he saw that dark figure in front of the Uchiha engraving, he felt the very cells of his body loosen and rise like effervescent bubbles.

 _Sweet,_ he thought, the giddiness shoving all else aside.

Light as a feather, he dropped himself to the grass, tiptoed over to try and sneak up on his unsuspecting friend. Sasuke was kneeling, silently, almost like he was praying, but Naruto didn't know if his eyes were open — hopefully not, because the stone with the memorial engraving was shiny and new, almost wetly so, and both of their silhouettes were apparent in it. Amorphous blobs with a hard sheen outlining them, overcast daylight filling the space between. He closed the distance he could see before him.

"Heh," he laughed in a brunt exhale, the result of collision with Sasuke's back. The blades of his shoulders pressed into Naruto's chest through his uniform. "Gotcha!"

Sasuke's reaction was visceral — a sharp, immediate roll of his shoulders; a leaning forward. "Get off of me."

"Not until you admit that I got you, _loser,"_ Naruto jeered, a laugh buoyant in his throat. Sasuke was warm and solid beneath him. He didn't realize how much he'd needed the physical contact, so he enjoyed it, burying his nose into sleek black hair and inhaling the fresh scent of his soap.

It was very short-lived — within seconds, he was on his ass on the ground. "Hey!"

"I told you to get off of me," Sasuke said, flat and sharp like the side of a knife. The usual. He stood up in one slow, silvery motion, turning to look down at Naruto with a scowl.

Those eyes, one ethereally light, one dark and loaded, were like magnets, like weights. Naruto felt something in his chest contract and then expand, something not quite a heartbeat. He was just out of breath.

The look lingered a moment too long, though, and too dense, the memorial silent around them save for a single bird's whining chirps. He felt himself frown. A weird itch flew in the space between his skin and muscle.

"What's wrong?" he asked.

Sasuke was quiet for another moment. It wasn't an unreasonable question, was it? He was supposed to be unsealed by now, back to normal, but he wasn't yet. And that was the one thing he wanted, but he'd have to wait until they figured out what the problem was, and they were still working on it. Sasuke wasn't exactly a patient guy. Good at biding his time, maybe, but not patient. And when he spoke, it only reminded Naruto of that.

"Why are you here?" His voice was quiet, a drag of cutting monotone.

Naruto swallowed. That answer came easy. It was the same one as always. "I was hoping we could hang out later. Y'know, after I'm done with patrols."

"And do what?"

That answer, somehow, did not come as easily. Naruto felt like a butterfly, the kind that made Shino upset — pinned to something, wings stuck by hairline metal rods, or in this case an iron gaze. He blinked, eyes to the grass, thoughts suddenly spilling onto his tongue and stumbling out.

"I — I dunno," he began. "I just had a weird day, and I know you're feeling kinda down because all this stuff is taking awhile." He tugged at the back of his hair. "We should go get food or something."

"I don't want to go anywhere."

He looked back up at Sasuke now, finding that gaze still hard and steady. He'd have to way to fix that. Somehow, he always could.

He sighed, huffing against the shake in his chest. "Dude, come on. I'll just come over if you want. I can bring you some of those onigiri you like from that nee-san's store, and then we can —"

"Shut up, Naruto." Sasuke turned, eyes straight ahead, and started to walk away. Naruto stood and bounded after him in an instant, catching the shoulder that no longer had an arm attached to it.

"Sasuke, wait." The loose fabric of the sleeve bunched between his fingers. "You don't have to isolate yourself, dude. We're gonna get this shit taken care of. Me and Sakura-chan and Kakashi-sensei." He had to believe it. "Let's all go eat together or —"

The most disarming thing happened then, cutting him short. Sasuke _laughed._ Not in the way people rarely got to see, that secret, full-bodied delight that filled Naruto with the same. No, it was that same haughty stab he was famous for, something no one had really heard since the fourth war.

"Are you fucking kidding me?" He shoved Naruto's hand away with his own. "You can't be serious."

Naruto ignored his motions again, grabbing his shoulder and turning him so that they were facing each other. Perfect eye level. "Why wouldn't I be? We're a team, aren't we?"

Something flitted across that straight expression. Something budged. Naruto could literally see the way Sasuke held onto it, the way it put emotion somewhere deep in his eyes, a twitch in his lip, and then the way he let go of it, a loss of tension somewhere that could only be sensed and not seen. His head tilted back a bit, looking down at him. Haughty.

"You always were too optimistic, weren't you."

Naruto could feel the wall he was putting up. _No._

"How is that being optimistic?" he asked sincerely, insistently, bridging some of the space between them. "We _are_ a team. I know we've all been doing our own things, but that doesn't mean we aren't — that we can't — that we can't depend on each other. We're a family."

Sasuke was no longer budging. He got even closer, close enough that their noses almost touched, invading the space to command it. He was angry, and it caught Naruto's breath like a fist.

"They aren't mine, Naruto. They're not my family. My family is dead." His eyes dropped. Naruto's heart beat in his eardrums, his jaw. And then they met his own again, impenetrable as a plate of steel. "And so is yours."

Years ago, that would have done the worst to Naruto. It would have broken something in him, a split like wood in the structure of his heart. Now, though, it only made his lip tremble, and he could suck it up. Sasuke's eyes watched his mouth.

"I" — he choked on it, just a bit, and decided to start over. "I know how hard this is for you —"

"Really? Do you?" The words were low, almost a whisper now given their proximity. "You, with all your infinite power, how _easy_ it is for you to have everything —"

"I just wanna help you, man," Naruto pressed, the words welling up in him like they were being pushed. He couldn't hear him talk like that anymore. It wasn't fair. He clenched Sasuke's shirt in his hand even tighter. "You don't have to be alone. That's all I want you to understand."

"You can't help me."

 _No. No. No._ "Yeah, actually, I can. You just have to let me."

"I _want_ to be alone. Can't you see that?" There was the barest breath in his words, and it wafted out against Naruto's face. "Don't be stupid, Naruto. Please."

"I'm _telling_ you, Sasuke, I'm not just gonna let you do this to yourself, not when you're so close to getting everything back. It's gonna be _okay_ —"

He was silenced by a hand over his mouth. His lips, still mid-word, were stuck open against Sasuke's cool palm. Air lodged itself painfully in his throat.

Sasuke said nothing. There was only the press of his gaze locked where Naruto couldn't look away, even if he tried; like he was waiting to see if Naruto would keep talking. He didn't dare. He could feel the pulse from Sasuke's hand on his mouth. He could taste the skin.

He would suffocate like this, he thought. And then the hand moved to his cheek.

"Don't," Sasuke said, voice quiet as a secret. "I'm going to leave, and I want you to go home when I do. Got it?"

His hand was solid on Naruto's cheek. A weight holding him to this moment. A circle of heat where his own breath had marked was warm against the skin of his face, a spot of sun in the coolness of Sasuke's hand. He felt the sudden, strange urge to turn his face into that palm, to feel the finger pads soft on his closed eyelids, the edge of the thumbnail against his patches of freckles. Feel his lips against the smooth heel of it. Bring his tongue, even, to the lines that crossed it. Taste all the places Sasuke's destiny would take him.

But he didn't. He shuddered an inhale, terrified of where his instincts lead, and thought.

No. He didn't want to leave Sasuke alone. He didn't want to go home.

"No," he said, a rasp catching his voice, and he met those eyes. One light, one dark. "I won't."

 _"Please,_ Naruto."

Sasuke stared for a moment. There was something there, behind that gaze, something stirring and fighting to get out.

"Talk to me," Naruto urged, his own voice quiet now, his free hand finding the one touching his face. He swallowed, and it was difficult to do so. "I'm here. Just tell me what's goin' on."

Neither of them spoke. Neither of them moved, save for Naruto's breath coming in heavy bursts, like he was running. He could feel the way his bandages closed against the smooth back of Sasuke's hand, every molecule of tension between the two of them. He wasn't going to just let this slide. Sasuke had to know that. After all this time, if nothing else, he had to know at least that.

He closed his eyes, and his jaw shifted beneath his skin. Closing himself off, again, like always.

"Let me go," he said, slipping his hand out of Naruto's grasp. "Just — let me go, and don't come find me."

And then, just like that, Sasuke walked past where they stood. No longer able to spirit himself away with a jutsu, this was the next best thing — a cold exit, a rustle of grass with every footstep, softer the further he moved away and the closer he got to the fence at the far boundary of the memorial. A stride with a purpose: trying to disappear.

"Sasuke!" Naruto called after his dark figure, knowing it would do no good, but knowing more that he had to try. _"Sasuke!"_

But Sasuke did not stop, did not falter, and he did not deviate from that singular force of a path. It was all Naruto could do to watch the broad, black shape get smaller, smaller, smaller until he couldn't see it at all.

It would be okay, he told himself, pressing his bandaged hand into his cheek to fill the gap Sasuke left. This wasn't forever. Times like this always started with Sasuke leaving, and with Naruto staring at his back, and they always worked out. Things would get fixed, and they would be better, and it would be alright. He would always find him in the end.

.

.

The damp, metallic smell of ANBU headquarters filled Naruto's head from the moment he entered. He'd never liked it, never felt at home in this place, but after his fight from earlier — a million miles away, it seemed like, but still just as shitty, that fight with Tsunade-baa-chan — something had really changed. The enclosed, windowless space of the rusty labyrinth of hallways made him feel like he would lose his mind.

He finished his duties as fast as he could. He checked them off, a list in his head. Sign out. Change out of his sleek, tight fatigues. Change back into his t-shirt and favorite sweatpants. Cover up the tattoo by his shoulder with the soft cloth of his sleeve. Be normal again.

He balled up his uniform shirt and pants, tucked his kunai and shuriken and gloves and leg bandages between the folds of his defense vest and closed it like a book. Threw everything into the locker. No mask to throw on top of the pile this time. He wondered, with a slight flush of embarrassment, whether Tsunade had done anything with it — thrown it away, sent it down here for repair, ordered him a new one, pulveried it into dust. Who knew. He felt kinda stupid now, thinking about his outburst, but…really, it'd been about more than just his status here.

His fingers curled around the cold metal of the locker door, his thumb digging into the inside of the lock. And then he shoved it shut. His hand covered the kana he knew was written on the outside.

 _Tatsu,_ they called him within the division, after his summons. Not _Bunta,_ like Gamabunta, the legendary chief of Myoubakuzan, or _Kichi,_ after Gamabunta's elder son, or even just _Kaeru,_ naming him a frog like every other member was named after the thing on their mask. _Tatsu,_ like Gamatatsu, the youngest of the toads he was bound to, the one no one ever took seriously — not even himself.

 _It's just a formality,_ Tsunade had told him. _You don't belong in ANBU._ He didn't want to accept how right she was.

No one greeted him on his way out. That wasn't how things worked around here — or maybe people just made a special case to avoid him. Not Neji, not Yamato, not Tenten, not Sai, but that was just because they'd all known each other before they got here. Whatever. He didn't feel like talking to anyone anyway. Well, that wasn't entirely true. If he'd seen Sai — who was basically his boss now, and it was weird — he would have talked to him. He would have asked him about the rest of what Tsunade had said. Not Yamato, who was too nice about that kind of stuff, but _him,_ Sai, unfailingly frank to the point of tactlessness.

The probability of war. He would have asked if he really wasn't supposed to worry about it. That had to be a lie. He _knew_ baa-chan was lying to him, because it was possible enough that they were all willing to put Sasuke through this. A dull stab tweaked in his gut. Naruto hated her for throwing him into this awful bullshit process, this trial and error, if she couldn't fix him immediately. If she couldn't give back what was taken. If she couldn't treat him like a fucking _human being._

The sun was low enough to qualify evening by the time Naruto made it out of the catacombs. A good while had passed since Sasuke had left the memorial — enough time that he'd probably cooled off, meditated, and was now reading in his living room with that one lamp on by the armchair. Naruto wondered what he'd done with the fight behind his eyes; whether he'd carefully tucked it away, never to be talked of again, or if he'd thrown enough kunai at a backyard tree to feel like it was gone. Only one way to find out.

"Kurama," Naruto said under his breath, wading through the people-filled streets of Konoha. The workday was over for office-level ninja and regular citizens alike.

 _Huh,_ was the only response he got, a light press to the back of his brain.

"What would you want to eat if you were mad?"

He slipped his hands in his pockets, squinting against the low beams of sun peeking between shop buildings and apartments as he walked. The smell of street food was heady, tantalizingly so — some yakitori was starting to sound _really_ good for a pre-dinner snack.

 _Didn't the kid tell you to leave him alone?_

Naruto laughed, a scoff that wasn't exactly funny, just at the predictability of the question. "Dude, you know that's never stopped me." He patted around his sides for his wallet. "That's his way of saying _don't make me talk about my feelings, I don't have any of those,_ or some dumb shit like that. And then I go to his house, and we play cards or something, and he feels better."

He laughed again, more genuinely this time at his own grumpy imitation of his friend, and Kurama didn't respond for a minute. That was fine. Naruto just window-shopped, glancing at steaming dango glazed with sticky, shiny kuromitsu at one old lady's food stand, yakisoba bread arranged in sloppy lines on the counter of the guy's cart next door, carrot pieces flung over every visible surface.

He kept walking, nothing striking his fancy on behalf of Sasuke. And then, when he finally reached the intersection at the end of the street:

 _I always used to eat people's guts when I was pissed off, until you came along._

Naruto's smile grew until it stretched from ear to ear, warmth in every part of his body.

"Lucky you," he said, louder this time, and turned the corner.

.

.

A rock slipped into the front of his sandals right as he made it to the gates of the Uchiha compound. In no time, it had rolled right into the space between his arch and the sole supporting it, and Naruto yelped as he pressed his foot into it mid-step.

"Shit," he hissed, trying to kick it out with a flail of his leg. The thing didn't even move a millimeter. "Fine, then, I see how it's gonna be."

He set down the plastic bags that had been digging into his arms, letting them gently settle onto the ground before removing his shoe. There were red marks on his visible forearm skin, crisscrosses from the handles. Maybe getting all that food had been overkill, but he wanted to make sure Sasuke had plenty of options. Fruit salad with tomatoes, onigiri, shrimp chips, a few bentos and sandwiches, just to name a portion of his spoils. The sweet stuff he'd bought, admittedly, was all for himself.

The rock — _pebble,_ apparently — flung itself out of his sandal. He wiped his bare foot on his opposite leg just in case, put his shoe back on, heaved all the bags back onto his arms. He wasn't going to leave tonight until he was sure Sasuke wasn't stuck in his head. He couldn't let him be alone in this. It fucking sucked, yeah, but he would do whatever it took to help him get his chakra back, and then he'd fight tooth and nail to get baa-chan and the council to leave him out of whatever fight was coming. Unless Sasuke wanted to join it, that was.

Naruto was strong, though. It was just a fact. He'd done things that should have been impossible, and he'd worked his ass off to get there. If he could accomplish all the things he'd done up to this point, he could protect the village, their country, everyone, fight alongside them himself. He could solve this, the right way.

He took the road down to the house Sasuke lived in, careful not to let his feel skid along the ground and make another rock find its way into his sandal. He let himself in the gate, food swinging in its bags, and walked up to the front porch, set the bags down again on the creaky wooden bench there so he could give the door a proper knock.

He waited for a good minute, rocking back and forth on his heels. A nervous excitement was building the way it always did when he got to hang out with his friends, and especially with Sasuke. He knocked again, in a rhythm this time, hoping it would annoy him into opening the door. With a devious grin, he brought his other hand to the door, rapping on it with both sets of knuckles in a very non-musical pattern.

After another minute or two of waiting, the grin faded. "Hmm."

He tried the knob, deciding to let himself in, as was occasionally the case with his visits. Unlocked, of course. The house was unlit save for the sunset radiating through the sliding glass of the back door. Also not unusual.

"Sasuke?" he called. He peeked into the kitchen, its plain white walls and counter, and suddenly remembered the time he'd cut himself trying — and failing — to make them vegetable fried rice and scrambled eggs for dinner. A deep gash above the top joint of his middle finger. Sasuke had — he'd — Naruto felt his face heat, recalling the almost instinctual manner with which Sasuke, irritated as always, had taken the bleeding finger into his mouth, pressed the wet heat of his tongue to the cut to help clot it.

"Sasuke?" he called again, yelling with enough emphasis on the sound of his name to wipe the memory away. He wasn't in the living room, either, the table clear of the games Naruto brought over or even an empty cup of water.

Maybe he was taking a nap. They'd both been taking a lot of those lately, both for the same reason. With that in mind, he went straight for the bedroom upstairs, taking them two at a time just because he could. The bathroom, which he passed on his way around the banister, was also empty; the hallways were starting to get dark now that the day was coming to a close, and they, too, were empty.

The bedroom door was ajar, and inside was same furniture as always. Bare walls, lined only by a wooden dresser, a side table with a lamp, and a bed. A few books were stacked neatly atop the first two surfaces, while the bed was made, void of any sign of Sasuke. Naruto had slept in that bed a few odd times over the past few years. He could still remember the burn of sleeping on one shoulder too long, feeling like he was bruised from its bizarrely hard mattress. He could still remember the way Sasuke's eyelashes, dark gray, rested gentle where they met his cheekbones as he slept. The only real time he didn't look angry, because he wasn't awake to be, Naruto thought with a wry smile.

He went to the window on the other side of the room, using it as a vantage point to see if he could spy Sasuke sweating out whatever was going on amongst the trees behind the house. All he could see, though, was green. No swift slip of black or the glow of his pale skin anywhere among them. Naruto didn't even have to touch his sage energy to know Sasuke wasn't here.

There were only two other places Sasuke ever went, especially when he was in a bad mood: either the memorial or his family's old house. He'd already visited one today — there was really only one other option.

He bounded down the stairs, three at a time, whistling to himself. The anxious, bubbling excitement had grown now that this had become a bit of a hide-and-seek. He'd find Sasuke, ankles and feet in the small creek in the Uchiha's backyard, and he would sneak up on him again, hug him from behind until he was shaken off with a pissy huff. The mental image made him snicker. He'd take care of putting the food away when he got back.

A sheen of orange cloaked the entirety of the Uchiha compound, bringing a beautiful light to the monotonous gray and white of all the houses within. It was easy to find Sasuke's childhood home. Always had been. It was like a beacon situated at the end of the longest side street, a big piece of land compared to the closer quarters of the smaller houses lining the road, windows reflecting the sun enough to make Naruto squint. He picked up the pace, unable to contain his limitless energy, the thrill of what awaited him.

He skipped the front door, headed around to the back and scaled the wall surrounding the garden with nimble hands and feet, did his best to be quiet. When he peeked over the top of it, his eyes zeroed in on exactly where he knew Sasuke would be, where victory awaited —

— only to find that, too, empty. He frowned, now, as his eyes traced the dried remains of the creek, the only water left now muddy and green with algae. The back porch was silent. The doors were all closed.

This was getting weird.

"If you're hiding just to be a pain in my ass," Naruto muttered, lifting himself effortlessly over the top and landing on a patch of browning grass, "I'm gonna punch you in the face."

He crept into the house, tripping only once on a floorboard that had been slightly unwedged from its place, accidentally sliding one of the back shogi doors closed a bit too loudly. The house was much darker than the other, and with the stark silence, the knowledge always sitting in the back of his head that Sasuke's family was _killed_ in here — it was more than a little eerie. The hairs on his arms stood up.

 _Got a bad feeling about this place, kid._

"You always do," Naruto whispered. "But I don't believe in ghosts."

 _Sure,_ Kurama said, bringing their attention to the shiver waiting to drop from the nape of his neck. _Keep telling yourself that._

"Shush."

Naruto pressed on, peering through door after door. Nothing but vacant rooms, all still and dusty, abandoned. Why Sasuke would want to come here, other than to be absolutely miserable, he couldn't fathom. There were too many rooms in this place, too many doors, nothing to be found behind them. He'd lost count of how many he'd opened — some perhaps twice. There was nothing he hated more than a fruitless search.

The whole thing was making him impatient. That nervousness and excitement from before mixed with this strange creep of dread all morphed into a big ball of energy, and he was already bad with staying hidden, with dealing with quiet. _Fuck it,_ he thought. He'd rather be on Sasuke's sofa now, trying to get him to crack a laugh.

"Sasuke," he called, cupping one hand beside his mouth, "dude, you in here?"

He waited.

No response.

His breath went tight in his chest. Enough was enough.

Now that the jig was up, and he no longer wanted the delayed gratification of taking Sasuke by surprise, he let his chakra coil into a shorter wavelength, let it loosen back out to pick up more on the environment of the home. Immediately he ran into a roadblock. Nothing but frigid, dark, terrible energy met his sage instincts — lingering effects of the sad, unfulfilled spirits of the Uchiha family. Trying to get past that dense, oppressive force and sense Sasuke, with an absence of even the thinnest shred of his chakra, was like walking knee-deep in quicksand. The shiver dropped, rippling chills over Naruto's back and arms.

It felt impossible to get through, a mass of ashes that would drown him if he looked too hard, and so he found himself pacing down the hallway instead, throwing every door open until it smacked against the other side of the wall.

Nothing.

Nothing.

Nothing.

"Damnit, Sasuke! Where the hell are you?!"

He flung open the door at the end of the hall, expecting nothing again. What else would there be?

But there _was_ something — huge blood stains and spatters spread across the tatami floor, old and new. The smell of them clear and thick. A black shadow floating above them.

His blood went cold.

At first, his eyes couldn't make out what they were seeing. Some kind of trick of the light, maybe?

No, there was a shape to it, the way it drifted motionless above the floor.

And then he made out the sight of a foot, colorlessly pale, red dripping dark from the ankle beneath the hem of black pants.

He took a step forward. His whole body was shaking, all of a sudden. His mouth went dry. A body was hanging, rope tied to the rafters exposed by carefully removed planks in the ceiling.

The wood was meticulously stacked by the wall. His stomach dropped.

"No," he said, the word splintered and broken. _No, no, no, no. Please. No._

He made himself look. He saw black hair. He saw the rope circling a white neck. He saw broad, familiar shoulders. Only one arm limp by its side.

"No," he repeated, breath coming fast now instead of stopped altogether. He stumbled over to the body — _it's not — it isn't — it can't be —_ to find the part that he couldn't see.

 _Stop, Naruto! NOW! Don't_ — Kurama was screaming at him, grating against his spine, the inner boundaries of his skull. He didn't listen. He had to make sure this was some stupid prank — or some other person. He couldn't lose — he — it _wasn't —_

The face. White lips, open. Black hair stuck to red. _Red._ There was so much of it, too much of it, _too_ _much_ of it, coming from the —

Eyes. They were — not closed, they were — not _empty_ , they were —

 _NARUTO!_

He lifted a hand, his real hand, fingers trembling uncontrollably, to touch the split eyelids. Slashed down the middle. The sockets behind them, mutilated, full of some unnameable _thing_ — gelatinous, cold. Bile rose in his throat.

Gray eyelashes, the color of charcoal, delicate, _his,_ coated in blood.

 _Don't come find me,_ Sasuke had said.

Naruto screamed.


End file.
